[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

[Thomas Schilling]

On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 12:17 -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
> andrewcoppin:
> 
> > Hackage seems like a nice idea in principle. However,
> 
> I think in practice too: we had no central lib archive or dependency
> system, now we have 400 libraries, and a package installer, 10 months 
> later. Until Hackage, there was a strong pressure not to reuse other 
> people's libraries.
> 
> > - The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent, 
> > some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
>  
>  1. Welcome to the internet.

Sure, but this doesn't mean we couldn't implement some mechanisms to
improve the situation.  Some things I could think of:

  - Have Hackage display a information of whether a package builds on a
particular platform.  Information could be provided by cabal-install (if
the user agrees, of course.)  

  - Allow uploaded packages receive minor patches, i.e., fixing .cabal
file.  This will probably be a recurring problem, since packages will be
updated and base will be split up further.

  - I don't know if a commenting system on hackage would be more useful
than on a package's homepage.  At least it would be useful to have a
package homepage and bug-tracker for each package.  Both could simply be
a code.google.com site.

Alltogether, I'm quite happy with Hackage.  There's room for
improvement, sure, but I think we're on the right track ...