Is HaskellDB dead? Is it worth extending? Is HaskellDirect dead or superseeded by the Haskell FFI? I am having difficulty discovering which FFI technology/package is still useful, viable and alive,
You have of course looked at http://haskell.org/? While development of libraries has to be rather fluid and dynamic, I think it would be a good idea for the web pages trying to keep track of packages seeing active use and development, and in particular marking packages that are useful but orphaned, or superceded by other packages. Some kind of status field, perhaps?
(see http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell@haskell.org/msg07009.html for my own old suggestion about this old problem)
Something for the communities report?
:-) to be found at: http://www.haskell.org/communities/ In a sense, the reports already do part of this, apart from: - while the communities report serves as an established format for prompting software authors/maintainers to tell the world what they've been up to (and to update their own pages;), it would still be nice if the status information collected there would make its way into the libraries/tools listings on haskell.org (a simple marker: "maintained by X; last heard of in Nov 2001" would be a start), together with the kind of information you suggest. - not everyone bothers to submit anything to the communities reports, in spite of invitations from the editor, so some very active projects might not be represented in the most recent edition. Starting last time, I explicitly invite "project pings" (just stating a contact, and that the project is still actively maintained), but even that doesn't get some people out of their holes.. So the communities reports do offer some help here, but there is still a lot of room for improvement, much of which beyond the reports.. Cheers, Claus