Participation in Cabal / Hackage development

[Thomas DuBuisson]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> All,
>
> I just mentioned ideas for Cabal 2 but I should also like to talk about
> how we can go about increasing participation in the development effort.
> We currently have nearly 200 open tickets which include many important
> bugs and no shortage of good ideas for useful new features.
>
>        Our limiting factor is developer time.
>
> Most of us use the Cabal / Hackage system in one way or another. Most of
> us are familiar with its annoyances and limitations. Unfortunately the
> number of people helping out has dropped rather in the past year or so.
>
> Perhaps we should run a little poll like the darcs hackers did to find
> out what we could do to increase participation so we can get on with
> building the tools that we all want, but a bit more quickly.

First, I'd like to thank Duncan for all the hard work on
Cabal/cabal-install.  It seems you're a little irritated by the lack
of fellow developers - which doesn't seem like an uncommon problem
lately as we've seen from Darcs and also a YHC mailing from Neil.

In my case, its been a lack of time and some shame over not following
through last time I intended to contribute to Cabal.  As for running a
poll, I don't have anything to blame my lack of participation on
except time.  This situation will hopefully change over the coming
months and I'll contribute to the community more.

For those looking at contributing, don't go to the cabal home page but
the hackage homepage.  For example, I just found:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/SourceGuide

Thomas