On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

All,

I just mentioned ideas for Cabal 2 but I should also like to talk about how we can go about increasing participation in the development effort. We currently have nearly 200 open tickets which include many important bugs and no shortage of good ideas for useful new features.

Our limiting factor is developer time.

Most of us use the Cabal / Hackage system in one way or another. Most of us are familiar with its annoyances and limitations. Unfortunately the number of people helping out has dropped rather in the past year or so.

Perhaps we should run a little poll like the darcs hackers did to find out what we could do to increase participation so we can get on with building the tools that we all want, but a bit more quickly.

First, I'd like to thank Duncan for all the hard work on Cabal/cabal-install. It seems you're a little irritated by the lack of fellow developers - which doesn't seem like an uncommon problem lately as we've seen from Darcs and also a YHC mailing from Neil. In my case, its been a lack of time and some shame over not following through last time I intended to contribute to Cabal. As for running a poll, I don't have anything to blame my lack of participation on except time. This situation will hopefully change over the coming months and I'll contribute to the community more. For those looking at contributing, don't go to the cabal home page but the hackage homepage. For example, I just found: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SourceGuide Thomas

On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 18:40 +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:

All,

I just mentioned ideas for Cabal 2 but I should also like to talk about how we can go about increasing participation in the development effort. We currently have nearly 200 open tickets which include many important bugs and no shortage of good ideas for useful new features.

Our limiting factor is developer time.

A secondary issue is design. We get lots of feature requests "there should be a way do to X". But there's quite a bit of work to get from there to a point where we can start coding. It's not even the design of the code that's the issue, but how the feature really should work. What the user interaction should be and how it should interact with other features. We've got dozens of tickets in our tracker in this state where they're not yet ready for someone to pick them up and implement it in an evening. This is certainly a barrier for anyone interested in Hacking on Cabal, they're not going to pick these tickets where it's not at all clear what they would have to implement. This is particularly noticeable if you look at the tickets not assigned to any milestone. See the last section in this report: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/report/12 A few random examples: #214 Package security #293 allow installation of non-haskell or haskell script executables #330 Support general documentation, not just haddock #364 cabal should allow source to be installed with/added to binary packages #457 cabal list: filter by pattern #237 Support addition of links to Cabal project pages #313 line counting Perhaps we need to make this more explicit in our bug tracker, have a milestone for tickets in limbo that need more design work. It might help to draw attention to them from people who want to see the feature implemented if we make it clear we cannot start work on them until various design issues are clarified. Duncan