Hackage plan

[Isaac Jones]

Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:

> While at the Hackathon, Björn, Ross, Ian, myself and others collected
> some ideas for directions in which Hackage (the web interface
> primarily, as opposed to cabal-install) should develop.   I put
> everything in this wiki page:
>
>   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/HackageToDo

:)

> It's quite rough, but I think it's a good starting point.

I added some ideas about searching / querying the package database.

One idea is that I really like the way trac does querying and
group-by.  Once you build a query, you can also get an RSS feed based
on that query.  It would be pretty easy, I'd guess, to have Hackage
output RSS as well as html.

> I suggest we do some more brainstorming and flesh out that page, and
> then extract a "plan" for how to proceed.  Of course the plan
> shouldn't be single threaded - there will be tasks that can be tackled
> independently, but there will necessarily be dependencies.  For
> example there are lots of things that can't be done until we have
> automatic package building of some kind.  We should have some
> milestones, focussed towards getting to a point that the system is
> usable quickly, and adding the bells & whistles later.

I think that, as far as Hackage (not cabal-install) is concerned, the
main usibility points are:

1) getting more packages into it
2) making sure that all the packages build together, and
3) searching

By the way, I really like the idea of tags instead of categories.
Although categories are simpler to understand and obvious, so perhaps
we should have a facet that's "PrimaryCategory" (or leaving the
category field alone and adding tags).  There is something to be said
for picking a "smart" default view for end-users, rather than giving
them too many choices.  This view is quite nice:
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html



peace,

  isaac