In terms of making the interface more friendly to beginners, I wonder if this is partially an issue of how to search and how to format the results. I just searched several places for "xml rpc" and found:

Hackage: the first few links from the google search are different versions of haxr
Hayoo: 0 packages found, but lists functions from packages including haxr
Hoogle: No results found
Haskell.org: No matches

When that happens I can broaden my search (just RPC or just XML), or I can go to google and search "haskell xml rpc" and find results, but without any sense of what I should be clicking on. I'll often start in one place, then hear about something on Haskell-Cafe that's more widely used and never came up in the results.

I realize Hayoo and Hoogle are specialized searches (although I imagine people do occasionally use them the way I did in this example), but it would be great if Hackage's search feature could provide its own summary results in a simple table, perhaps like this:

Date Released | Last Updated | Downloads | Focus

Where "focus" is a one or two liner explaining the intended use or scope of the package, ideally written with comparisons to similar packages in mind. That way if you search "xml rpc" and are immediately given results for a couple of packages, you can get some sense of what's current, what's being used, and the scope or intended use of the package.

I'm not sure if this format would work for everyone of course, but I do think some of the ideas coming out of this discussion are promising. And for my part, I'm going to make an effort to participate on the wiki once I wrap a couple projects.

Best,
Eric

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 8:31 AM, KC <kc1956@gmail.com> wrote:

Librarians have been struggling for years with classifying topics; I
don't imagine classifying coding libraries as any easier. :)

--
--
Regards,
KC

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