On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 18:43 +0100, Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
What could be done is letting the community rate the quality of the modules for each platform? Maybe with user comments? Like amazon.com (so we hackazon.org ;-) And using lambdas instead of stars for giving the rating :)
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 15:55 -0200, Mauricio wrote:
There's a 'stability' field on cabal description files. Maybe it could appear after the name on the main listing. Or, all packages marked as 'Stable' at that field could get a beautifull color.
My main problem with these mechanisms is that they require a lot of manual work and there is no way to ensure the information is accurate or authoritative. If what we want to know is "does the package build" then we should build it and find out. We should build it on a 100 different platform combinations and combine the information. That's what we're trying to do with the new haskage-server and cabal-install. Lack of developer time is hampering progress. The stability field is almost useless. There is no agreement on what it means and most packages lack it. If what we want to know is "is this version of the package API compatible with this one" then we should follow the package versioning policy. We should let packages opt-in to the policy and if they op-in we should enforce it. That gives us real information and real guarantees. Similar comments apply for test suites and code coverage. Automation and collection of useful information. What human comments are great for however is describing the quality of the API, how well it composes, how good the documentation is, how easy it is to understand and use. That kind of information can only be gleaned through use. I don't know if a star/lambda rating system would be very helpful. There are only a few similar packages in each category (even for xml and databases). Once we eliminate the ones that clearly do not build (using the automatically collected info) then there will only be the comments for two or three packages to review. That's not that much and star rating probably do not provide a very good summary to help in that decision. Automation! Automation! Automation! (Oh and more hackers to help us with these vial community infrastructure projects) Duncan