2013/5/6 Tillmann Rendel <rendel@informatik.uni-marburg.de>
Petr Pudlák wrote:

    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From: *Niklas Hambüchen* <mail@nh2.me <mailto:mail@nh2.me>>
    Date: 2013/5/4
    ...
    I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a
    quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?"
    for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better
    indications concerning this.


This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If
you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit
reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would
display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since
D.M.Y."

I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of package development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working package maintainers with emails about their perfect packages that actually didn't need any updates since ages ago.

I understand, but replying to an email with an empty body or clicking on a link once in a few months doesn't seem to be an issue for me. And if somebody is very busy and doesn't update the package, it's more fair to signal from the start that (s)he doesn't want to maintain the package.

Personally it happened to me perhaps several times that I used a promising package and discovered later that's it's not being maintained. I'd say that the amount of time required to confirm if authors maintain their packages is negligible compared to the amount of time people lose this way.

Just out of curiosity, do you have some examples of such packages, that are being maintained, but not updated since they're near perfect? I'd like to know if this is a real issue. It seems to me
 

So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and display information about the development status of packages that allow potential users to *guess* whether the package is maintained or not. Currently, potential users have to collect this information themselves.

Here are some examples I have in mind:

 * Fetch the timestamp of the latest commit from the HEAD repo
 * Fetch the number of open issues from the issue tracker
 * Display reverse dependencies on the main hackage page
 * Show the timestamp of the last Hackage upload of the uploader

Tillmann

Those are good ideas. Some suggestions:

I think we already have the timestamp of each upload, this already gives some information. Perhaps we could add a very simple feature saying how long ago that was and adding a warning color (like yellow if more than a year and red if more than two years).

Reverse dependencies would certainly help a lot, but it works only for libraries, not for programs. (Although it's less likely that someone would search hackage for programs.)

The problem with issue trackers is that (a) many packages don't have one, (b) there are many different issue trackers.


Best regards,
Petr