Re: [Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

Andrew Coppin writes:

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

...

Andrew Coppin writes:

...

(Unless you're suggesting that I should try to actually *fix* these things. The way I figure it, if an army of developers who are already experts on the subject haven't been able to fix it yet, it must be extremely hard, and so there's no way *I* can fix it.)

Or maybe they have other things to do (e.g. Duncan is working, finishing off his PhD thesis and answering queries like this; when do you expect him to get any hacking done? :p).

I wonder... How many people are actually working on Cabal?

When I first started using Haskell, I got the impression that there were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of developers working on GHC. (After all, how else could you write such a huge codebase in less than two centuries?) But now it appears the number of active developers is nearer to 3. This is obviously a jaw-droppingly tiny number of people to be working on such a gigantic piece of software. If it's really true, it's amazing anything ever gets done at all!

So now I wonder about Darcs, Cabal, Haddock, Hackage, and all those other big projects. Do they really have a bazillion people working on them? Or is it just two blokes in their spare time? (And, more importantly, how do you find out?)

Seeing as how we don't have a bazillion people using Haskell... ;-) My understanding is that Cabal, Haddock, Hackage (as in the web infrastructure, etc.) and GHC all have a small core team of about 3 developers and a whole bunch of people who have committed patches at one time or another and might even do so on an irregular basis. Darcs seems to have a larger team behind it. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com