Conrad Parker wrote:

On 08/07/07, Neil Mitchell wrote:

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Hi

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Looks like there's too many packages on hackage.haskell.org now for a single page listing:

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html

Perhaps we can have a page with just the categories, with subpages hanging off?

Please don't. With one large page I can search the entire page quickly, and its only 6 printed pages long - I think most people here will be used to a 12 page limit :-)

In the future once its all nicely searchable, tagged, etc. we might consider presenting the information in a different way, but one single page is still fine.

Also, the categorization doesn't quite correspond to, say, the library hierarchy. For example, tagsoup is listed under Data, whereas it exports modules under Text and could just as well be categorized under Web. Similarly, xmonad is listed under System, but you might reasonably expect to find it under User Interfaces (or Interfaces ... those two seem to overlap ;-).

For me, a single page makes it difficult to browse the list to "see what's interesting" or to see what package would fit my current needs most. Scrambled categorizations have the same effect. Also, I'd favor a greater distinction between applications and libraries. For browsing libraries, I like the wiki pages much more than hackage. Can't those two be merged into one? Regards, apfelmus

bulat.ziganshin:

Hello apfelmus,

Sunday, July 8, 2007, 5:20:18 PM, you wrote:

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Looks like there's too many packages on hackage.haskell.org now for a

it's the nicest problem i can imagine :)

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For browsing libraries, I like the wiki pages much more than hackage. Can't those two be merged into one?

may be we just need alternative single-page listing with FULL package descriptions instead of brief one. this should be rather close in amount of information to old wiki. "Categories" section on top of page should be enough for anyone who need pages split by category

many years ago i already proposed to extend hackage to include information about general entities, not only packages uploaded to it. unfortunately, its author was not interested in this. i still think that joining up HCAR, libraries&tools wiki pages and hackage into the one information source will give us significant benefits, making searching of needed library easier, especially for casual haskellers. as you can see, in many cases, haskellers think that some libraries doesn't exist just because it's hard to find them

Another idea I've been pondering is allowing people to add links to documentation for libraries, from their hackage page. We have a fair few libs documented in blog form, here, http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Blog_articles So adding links to those from the hackage page for the library would help. -- Don

ketil:

On Mon, 2007-07-09 at 10:30 +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:

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Another idea I've been pondering is allowing people to add links to documentation for libraries

My main worry about Hackage is that it is often hard to tell the current status of packages - it could easily develop into a huge list of mostly dead projects.

The current deliverables seem to consist of a tar file and a package description, neither of them accurately dated.

Yes, I'd like uploader dates/names too. Something like: xmonad-0.3 - July 2007

I'd like to see: links to project home pages,

That's already provided via the 'homepage: ' field, see, e.g. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/xmonad

darcs (devel) repositories,

yes, I'd support a 'repository: ' field.

email address of maintainers.

handled by the 'maintainer: ' field

I'd also like browsable README and ChangeLog or similar. And what about a darcs-graph plot?

a link to the README might be good. If there was a 'repository' field, we could automatically compute the darcs-graph, a la, http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/images/commits/community/ Who's our SoC hackage guy? To do list right here!

sascha.boehme:

Hello,

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Who's our SoC hackage guy? To do list right here!

The HackageDB project is for now concentrating on another subject. I see the necessity of adding search features and additionally tags, but in the moment I work on automatic generation of Haddock documentation.

The progress and a to do list can be found from here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/wiki/SoC2007Hackage

A more complete ToDo list can be found here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageToDo

This also covers your wishes, and, as soon as automatic Haddock documentation is working, I'll turn towards that.

Great Sascha. We often discuss how to improve hackage on the #haskell irc channel -- perhaps you could just idle there while you're doing your SoC project, as there's quite a community of users there with ideas/questions about hackage, and how to best use and improve it? -- Don

Another idea I've been pondering is allowing people to add links to documentation for libraries, from their hackage page. We have a fair few libs documented in blog form, here,

Beeing able adding some comments (wiki style) would be cool. This way we could add comments such like: Have a look at ... which does the same thing but better. Unmaintaned etc.. Marc Weber

Please don't. With one large page I can search the entire page quickly, That's what I'm doing all the time as well. There are more options: Using columns ;) Showing one category only / all packages optionally. So I vote for keeping the existing page. But I don't mind having also somithing different additionaly.

Marc