On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 3:24 PM, haskell@kudling.de wrote:

Nice, thank you for the great work.

Browsing the reverse dependencies of popular packages like "bytestring" http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~roel/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/revdeps/bytestr... can be improved a bit. You should try "base" ;-)

1) Can you please sort the reverse dependent package names? That makes it easier to find packages with certain names.

2) I found the columns "Direct" and "Indirect" confusing until i found out that they show the number of reverse dependencies for those packages themselves and are not related to direct/indirect dependencies of the current package. I don't think it is necessary to provide those data here and i would be in favor of reducing the information overload by leaving those data to each package detail page.

I'll respond to 1 and 2 since they are related. Right now the packages are sorted by their "total" reverse-dependency count. The idea is that this gives an idea of the relative "importance" of a package (in the closed system of the hackage packet database). However, sorting by name makes just as much sense. Sorting by reverse-dependency count is useful if you want to know which are the most important reverse dependencies. Sorting by name is useful if you want to find out if a specific package is a reverse dependency. Ideally I would like to support both. Maybe a bit of JavaScript could be used to sort the table client-side. Something like this: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/

3) Can you try to print the reverse packages horizontally instead of vertically in tables? Browsing two long tables of direct/indirect reverse dpependencies like for "bytestring" makes it tedious to get an overview.

That would make sense if I wouldn't also show the reverse-dependencies of the reverse-dependencies. But I still think that information is usefull. Another option would be to have the two tables side-by-side. But that might be a bit to much for a modestly sized monitor. Again, I wonder what could be achieved with a little JavaScript in this area. Thank you for the constructive criticism, Roel