Active Haskell development and libraries

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Mark Carroll <mark@chaos.x-philes.com> wrote,

> The Libraries and Tools For Haskell page has quite a list of things, but a
> few broken links, and links to very many projects that seem to have
> started off as interesting research projects that, as the page itself
> says, were more proofs of concept and are no longer maintained.
> 
> We can't help but be slightly worried by this when we're thinking about
> what language(s) try out for production code, given that when we look at
> things like Objective Caml there are nice things like the Caml Humps at
> http://caml.inria.fr/humps/ that shows a lot of recent work, and even a
> new O'Caml O'Reilly book coming out (well, mostly a translation of the
> French book, I think). The Haskell Communities and Activities Report is a
> great start for showing some recent Haskell activity, and the Libraries
> and Tools page at least separates out the unsupported GUI-libraries, and
> there is certainly some good stuff for Haskell - for instance, we like
> HUnit and Haddock, and I'm thinking that Parsec might come in handy.
> Still, at our end we're wanting to stop and think:
> 
> I'm looking forward to reading the next communities and activities report.
> In particular, I want to reassure myself that there is a lot of useful
> actively-maintained stuff we can use, and more coming. Although I'm very
> happy that the libraries and tools page exists at all, I wonder if there's
> any possibility of the Haskell stuff being listed in a nice table too,
> including information as when the latest release was and with what
> versions of which Haskell compilers each thing was last found to be
> working. Maybe there is some existing free software that can make such a
> site easily maintained?

You surely have a point here.  IMHO what is needed is a
system that allows library, tool, etc maintainers to add,
edit, and delete entries themselves.  If these entries are
annotated with the date of the last update, it also becomes
easier to gauge whether a project is still alive.  An
automatic system might even test for stale links and remove
or mark them.

An alternative to set up our own system would be to use an
existing one; eg, freshmeat.com.  There is a "Haskell"
sub-category under programming languages:

  http://freshmeat.net/browse/834/?topic_id=834

which currently contains only 14 entries.  At the very
least, this sub-category could be linked from the "Libraries
and Tools page" (Hello Olaf & John!) and people could be
encouraged to submit their work to freshmeat.  The nice side
effect of this is that Haskell software, then, also pops up
in general language-independent searches on freshmeat.

Manuel