Not to discourage this brainstorming, but many of what people think to be "new ideas" are being implemented by a GsoC student [1] already. Yay!
I've rather recently started to use cabal-install to install packages from Hackage. Unfortunately, so far many packages fail to install. I try to email authors/maintainers, but when I check build logs on Hackage, I discover that some of these packages have failed building for some time.
The hackage build logs can be misleading - many system specific packages may or may not build on hackage because it just isn't the right OS. Still other packages require particular C libraries that the hackage server doesn't have. For these reasons the build reports will come from end developer systems (see linked blog).
Wouldn't it make sense to provide automated notification of the package author when a package fails to build? I certainly would like to know about it, but of course, I never remember to check back to see.
Yes, but because this comes from the cabal-installer vs hackage there was more work needing done.
How about taking it one step further, actually "hiding" unmaintained packages after a grace period?
Talk to Gracenotes and Coutts - they can be found on #hackage frequently. Cheers, Thomas [1] http://cogracenotes.wordpress.com/