On 6/3/06, Bryan Burgers
Recently, I have seen a few messages to Haskell Cafe (Like Marc Weber's "Is there any url lib?" and Ferenc Wagner's "LDIF output library", as well as many replies like "oh, you can find that library at this link...") that have prodded me to ask what I've been wondering for a long time.
What are the pros and cons of having a library repository for Haskell libraries. At current, I'm thinking of Perl's CPAN, which many Perl experts claim is the most important aspect of Perl ("Don't reinvent the wheel" is a common reply at Perlmonks.org), and I believe Ruby has something similar (RubyGems?). It seems to me that with the emergence of Cabal as a standard way to package Haskell libraries, this could be possible.
Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of pros and cons I came up with.
Pros: * Localized place to find libraries. If I want to know if a urllib exists, I can go to the server and search for 'url' and come up with relevant libraries. * Encourages programmers to share their libraries. If there's a place to put libraries, I would imagine that some people who have good libraries lying around might put them there. Or if they have something close, they might generalize it into a library and put it there.
Cons: * It obviously needs a server, which costs money, and other things like that cost money. * Personel. It would take a bit of initiative to start a project like this, as well as continued upkeep. That would either require some knowledgable volunteers, or, once again, money.
I'd love to hear the thoughts of the community on this.
We're working on it. Here's a tiny proof-of-concept: http://hackage.haskell.org/ModHackage/Hackage.hs?action=view Paolo Martini's Summer of Code project is to make the Hackage/Cabal-get tools easily available to the end-user (they will be distributed with Cabal). Feel free to poke Isaac Jones, Paolo or me if you want to volunteer. We can fill you in on the plans, how far we're along and where your help is most needed. Of course, there's also the anonymous route via http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/65 and various TODO files. -- Friendly, Lemmih