Re: [Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

Daniel Fischer writes:

On Saturday 21 August 2010 14:57:26, Andrew Coppin wrote:

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Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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Andrew Coppin writes:

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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... ;-)

I don't know - how many packages are on Hackage now? That's a few GB of source code, right? It didn't write itself. ;-)

How many people have hackage accounts? Much fewer than a bazillion (I think, how much is a bazillion anyway?). Some of them are *very* productive.

A Bazillion is an imaginary number meant to indicate something extremely large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazillion#-illion Since the population of the planet is roughly 6 Billion, I would guess that Andrew is under the miscomprehension that aliens make up the vast majority of Haskell users (or else he is taking into account everyone who will ever use Haskell as well, since after all Haskell will eventually replace all other inferior languages to become the One True Language!).

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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.

OK, wow. Makes you wonder how anything ever gets done at all, eh?

It's a kind of magic.

I believe Don wrote a successor to lambdabot to generate all of his libraries for him, and Galois is just a front to make it appear that multiple people are working on these libraries when in reality it's just his bot. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com