Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage checking maintainership of packages

Hi, Petr Pudlák wrote:

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Niklas Hambüchen* 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. 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