The state of Hackage: what are we doing about it?
I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries, bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality. I've tried to summarize the state of Hackage, and what projects are active to make it easier to find high quality libraries: http://tinyurl.com/2cqw9sb Thoughts? -- Don
Excerpts from Don Stewart's message of Tue Jun 01 01:13:20 +0200 2010:
I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries, bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality.
I want to send a small reminder that there was the idea adding a public wiki for each project which can react upon wishes of users faster than everything else: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hackage_wiki_page_per_project_discussion Marc Weber
Marc Weber schrieb:
Excerpts from Don Stewart's message of Tue Jun 01 01:13:20 +0200 2010:
I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries, bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality.
I want to send a small reminder that there was the idea adding a public wiki for each project which can react upon wishes of users faster than everything else: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hackage_wiki_page_per_project_discussion
This seems to be part of current efforts. Quoting http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/there-are-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-haskell... "2. Google Summer of Code: Hackage 2.0 – we have Matt Gruen working this summer to finish the implementation of Hackage 2.0 – an improved Hackage that will allow for many new features to help sort out the wheat from the chaff in Haskell packages: build reports, wiki commenting, and social voting."
On May 31, 2010, at 19:13 , Don Stewart wrote:
I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries, bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality.
One thing that might help is just a less cluttered/better organized interface. I always have to use browser find on the package list page. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
2010/6/1 Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH
On May 31, 2010, at 19:13 , Don Stewart wrote:
I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries, bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality.
One thing that might help is just a less cluttered/better organized interface. I always have to use browser find on the package list page.
The browser find can be quite effective when the descriptions are good. It could also be less boring to use if each package was in a single category. Cheers, Thu
On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 04:13:20PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
I've tried to summarize the state of Hackage, and what projects are active to make it easier to find high quality libraries:
Thoughts?
Some (maybe stupid) ideas for what could be help people to decide which stuff to use: - "Liveness" of a library, that is: does it still get updates? Does it build with recent versions of GHC? (I think freshmeat has something like this, but I'm not sure how useful it is in reality) - Reverse dependencies -- how many other libraries and/or programs are using this library (Maybe something for Hackage-2.0)? Also: Average liveness (and probably other metrics) for "near" reverse dependencies, so if you have 100 libraries depending on each other but are just old and dead stuff, they will get "scored down". - Part of the Haskell Platform? Those libraries should get some extra marker (including to which version of the Haskell Platform they belong). I know, the mere usage count of a library isn't necessarily a sign of quality, but if you have some old stuff that's not used by anything and doesn't implement some very special/exotic feature, it's probably not worth looking at. Ciao, Kili
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Matthias Kilian
- "Liveness" of a library, that is: does it still get updates? Does it build with recent versions of GHC?
Note that Hackage already shows the upload date and for which versions of GHC the package does and doesn't build.
- Reverse dependencies -- how many other libraries and/or programs are using this library (Maybe something for Hackage-2.0)?
My brother Roel created a patch for this. See ticket #576: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/576 Also see our mirror Hackage that implements that patch: http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~roel/hackage/packages/hackage.html The server automatically synchronizes with Hackage daily. It would be great to have this in the regular Hackage however! Regards, Bas
participants (7)
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Bas van Dijk -
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH -
Don Stewart -
Henning Thielemann -
Marc Weber -
Matthias Kilian -
Vo Minh Thu