Revive deleted code of Elm packages

[rupert]

@Augustin82

Is there any chance we can address some of the strong things that @malaire said? Even though it’s apparent Malaire’s angry, the underlying points seem very much worth talking about, don’t they?

I have this mirror running:

Elm Alternative Package (Mirror) Live

As part of my work on an alternative package manager for Elm, I have updated its package index. You should be able to run a build through it by doing the following: > mv ~/.elm ~/.elm-old > mitmdump --ssl-insecure -M '|https://package.elm-lang.org/|https://package.eco-elm.org/v1/' > https_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:8080 elm make src/Main.elm There is also a step needed to whitelist the mitmdump certificate authority on your local box to allow it to proxy an https endpoint - you can find instructi…

Its in a bit of a broken state right now, since the domain name expired (deliberately, I meant to change it), and it currently still needs a manual trigger to update it and fetch the latest packages.

I feel motivated by this ‘incident’, and also recent threats from GitHub to change .zip checksums, to try and get this to a properly functioning state, just hard to find the time right now, so we’ll see. The infrastructure is open sourced, so others are free to try too: GitHub - eco-pack/eco-server: Alternate Elm package server

That would solve the package deletion issue, since this package server keeps a copy of the package .zips locally, and does not rely on GitHub. At the very least, I should be able to recover old .zips from there, even if it is not used to actually compile against.

buggy dead language

The other issue the Malaire brings up seems to be that Elm is a “buggy dead language”. Really there is no need to bad mouth Elm in this way, and hopefully Malaire will now be leaving us alone to continue working in a friendly and constructive way, since he no longer has any remaining interest in Elm.

There are bugs, and I have spent some time cataloging and documenting them (here). All software systems have bugs, and viewed amongst all open sourced code in the world, I would hazard a guess that Elms bug count/line is at the low end. It is very high quality code, or it would not still be viable unchanged for 4 years. Things are not perfect of course. Anyway, we already have a thread going for this discussion so perhaps better if we just continue the conversation there instead: Request: Elm 0.19.2: any update to help adoption to prove that Elm is not dead?

Its not dead, or there would not be people like Martin and myself prepared to put in effort like this on “reputational damage limitation” or keeping the package eco system going and so on. Not that we want to be doing things like this, but there are probably about 20 people who have stayed solid with Elm over the last 5 years that are all competent engineers, and who will do what is necessary to keep it going - mostly we are just busy with our real jobs.

So please, if you used Elm in the past and enjoyed it, don’t get angry and pull the plug. It isn’t necessary and it costs you nothing to continue to be a friend, and to leave your Elm packages intact on GitHub. Or if you really want to remove them, just come on here and ask if anyone is using them and perhaps if they would like to take over maintaining them.