On Tue, Nov 27, 2007 at 12:32:45AM -0000, Claus Reinke wrote:
i'd much rather have hackage tell me which packages are usable with my platform (build-reports verifying .cabal file accuracy), than tell me how many people on other platforms are using those packages without caring about portability to other platforms!-)
Absolutely, I'd like to see this too. My proposal is along those lines, that we use cabal-install to gather test feedback and that hackage should collect and summarise that data. It's not trivial however, it needs quite a lot of infrastructure.
I opened a bug on it the other day:
yes, that sounds promising. but then i recalled my standard answer when microsoft asks me to let them know the details about how acrobat plugin or ghc or whatever have crashed: it is "no", plain and simple. so, perhaps promising in theory, but not in practice?
I don't know how hackage would fair, but we get a number of Debian users giving feedback via the popularity-contest package: http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=ghc6,hugs&show_installed=on&want_legend=on&want_ticks=on&from_date=&to_date=&hlght_date=&date_fmt=%25Y-%25m&beenhere=1 All we can do is try it and see what happens, I think.
- is there a README file? this should be a must, and there are too many packages on hackage that hardly tell me anything about what they do, nor how or whether they build on my platform (the how has been improving with new .cabal fields, but those fields aren't used everywhere..)
What would go in README that wouldn't go in either the Cabal "description" field or the haddock docs?
- is there a build-tools field? if there is no README, this is a must have.
Once Cabal uses the build-tools field in the same way that it uses the build-depends field you won't be able to omit this (unless you don't need any tools to build). Thanks Ian