On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 03:17, John Millikin
The package summary is "Type-safe ADT-database mapping library.", which gives some idea about what it does.
Whence my suggestion to show this on the package's page. Perhaps I shouldn't have hidden that at the bottom -- I meant this as my main point, and I'm afraid I got a little side-tracked.
In my experience, any package that starts its source files with
{-# LANGUAGE GADTs, TypeFamilies, ExistentialQuantification, StandaloneDeriving, TypeSynonymInstances, MultiParamTypeClasses, FunctionalDependencies, FlexibleInstances, FlexibleContexts, OverlappingInstances, ScopedTypeVariables, GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving, UndecidableInstances, EmptyDataDecls #-}
is probably an experiment in what is possible, rather than a production-friendly library.
An experiment that I was interested in, and hoped to find out more about. But anyway, I see your point.
Many people upload experimental packages to Hackage so that they can be used by other interested people, even though the packages are not ready/intended for mass consumption. A lack of documentation in such cases is understandable.
Some way of documenting this fact would, however, be helpful.
I wonder if it would be worth giving package uploaders control over whether their packages are shown on the package list? Packages can be manually hidden by emailing an admin, but that's a lot of trouble.
In this case I followed an external link, so that would not have helped me. There is the "stability" field, which has an "experimental" value, but it's not at all clear what the different values mean other than "stable". It is fair that some packages on Hackage are not intended for human consumption. Perhaps this is caused in part by having our package installer and humans looking in the same place for information about Haskell libraries. But I think we can do a better job of distinguishing these packages. Perhaps a "visibility" or "release-status" field? --Max