On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 12:17 -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
andrewcoppin:
Hackage seems like a nice idea in principle. However,
I think in practice too: we had no central lib archive or dependency system, now we have 400 libraries, and a package installer, 10 months later. Until Hackage, there was a strong pressure not to reuse other people's libraries.
- The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent, some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
1. Welcome to the internet.
Sure, but this doesn't mean we couldn't implement some mechanisms to improve the situation. Some things I could think of: - Have Hackage display a information of whether a package builds on a particular platform. Information could be provided by cabal-install (if the user agrees, of course.) - Allow uploaded packages receive minor patches, i.e., fixing .cabal file. This will probably be a recurring problem, since packages will be updated and base will be split up further. - I don't know if a commenting system on hackage would be more useful than on a package's homepage. At least it would be useful to have a package homepage and bug-tracker for each package. Both could simply be a code.google.com site. Alltogether, I'm quite happy with Hackage. There's room for improvement, sure, but I think we're on the right track ...