si:

Don wrote

...

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?

the Hayoo! group is currently extending the search engine, such that it becomes possible, to not only search types and functions, but also search the package descriptions. Building a search index for the cabal package description is already implemented. At the moment the Hayoo! search interface is is the missing part. Technically it's not a difficult extension, but currently we don't have very much spare time.

For ranking the results for a package search, a download statistic could be very useful and could easily be integrated. If such a statistic would be available in machine readable format (csv, xml, plain text, ...), we could integrate that.

I've been posting CSV files of the download statistics here: http://www.galois.com/~dons/hackage/hackage-downloads.csv The next quarter's aggregated downloads are due soon. The Arch Haskell site uses these stats to compute some popularity metrics: http://www.galois.com/~dons/arch-haskell-status.html -- Don