On Wed, 2010-04-07 at 00:40 -0400, Matthew Gruen wrote:
Hi Haskellers,
I'm Matt Gruen (Gracenotes in #haskell), and the Hackage 2.0 SoC project at http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1587 really piqued my interest. It seems doable, in a summer, to make the new hackage-server more-than-deployment-ready as well as clearing out some items in the hackage bug tracker[0]; so, I've been working on a proposal. In this email I'd like to consolidate my mental notes for haskell-cafe and formulate a roadmap towards a more social Hackage.
The most vital part is getting hackage-server http://code.haskell.org/hackage-server/ to a state where it can be switched in place of hackage-scripts http://darcs.haskell.org/hackage-scripts/, and doing it properly, organizing the code so it can be extended painlessly in the future. Duncan Coutts, Antoine Latter, and others have done some great work on it in the past few years. I've been using Haskell for 1.33 of those years. I think I could become fluent in the codebases after a week of dedicated study, although even the hackage-server and hackage-scripts repositories don't include some components such as the current build report script.
For putting the 2.0 in Hackage 2.0, any interface changes should help the library users and the library writers/uploaders without hurting either of them. Hackage should contain more of the right kind of information. Statistics help everyone, and they're a pretty good gauge on the direction of Hackage as a whole. Package popularity contents are one form of this. Reverse dependencies and even dependency graphs[1] are great, if I can integrate and expand Roel van Dijk's work[2].
There should also be some space on package pages, or on pages a link away from them, for users to contribute information and suggestions. Coders can explain why or why not the package met their needs, as a sort of informal bug/enhancement tracking service. Another helpful flavor of information is package relationships beyond dependencies: 'Deprecated in favor of Foo', 'a fork of Foo', or 'does blah instead of Foo's plugh functionality'. This will help people find the 'right' package among look-alikes. There could also be links to illustrative usage examples for getting started. Happstack's state management will be a good match for updating and serving this information in real time.
I guess 'works also with B in version X.Y.Z' is also. Most of the above changes should not be IMHO in cabal (sorry for answering PS here). Especially 'not maintained anymore' and 'does not build on recent GHC' ;)
There's also a need for a more interactive form of package documentation, but this should strengthen relationships with existing tools like Haddock and Cabal, not bypass the tools. For example, adding a changelog[3] or making Haddock's declaration-by-declaration commentary more wiki-like[4]. Changelogs seem to be within the scope of Hackage 2.0, integrating with Cabal; Haddock wikification might not be, perhaps deserving a separate student-summer session of its own. These can improve the package page and documentation subtrees.
As we are with Haddock - 'rebuild' button if package failed to build? For some reasons some packages fails to build on hackage (as yi). I'm not sure if it will work however. At least uploading docs should be possible. Regards