Simon Marlow
While at the Hackathon, Björn, Ross, Ian, myself and others collected some ideas for directions in which Hackage (the web interface primarily, as opposed to cabal-install) should develop. I put everything in this wiki page:
:)
It's quite rough, but I think it's a good starting point.
I added some ideas about searching / querying the package database. One idea is that I really like the way trac does querying and group-by. Once you build a query, you can also get an RSS feed based on that query. It would be pretty easy, I'd guess, to have Hackage output RSS as well as html.
I suggest we do some more brainstorming and flesh out that page, and then extract a "plan" for how to proceed. Of course the plan shouldn't be single threaded - there will be tasks that can be tackled independently, but there will necessarily be dependencies. For example there are lots of things that can't be done until we have automatic package building of some kind. We should have some milestones, focussed towards getting to a point that the system is usable quickly, and adding the bells & whistles later.
I think that, as far as Hackage (not cabal-install) is concerned, the main usibility points are: 1) getting more packages into it 2) making sure that all the packages build together, and 3) searching By the way, I really like the idea of tags instead of categories. Although categories are simpler to understand and obvious, so perhaps we should have a facet that's "PrimaryCategory" (or leaving the category field alone and adding tags). There is something to be said for picking a "smart" default view for end-users, rather than giving them too many choices. This view is quite nice: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html peace, isaac