[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Neil Mitchell wrote:

>> - The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent,
>> some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
> 
> The problem is that only one person gets to comment on the quality of
> a library, the author, who is about the least objective person.

Not necessarily.  CPAN has a nice voting system for packages, which is 
quite widely used.

Another useful proxy for quality that CPAN is missing is download 
statistics.  The maintainers handwave about this being due to the wide 
geographic distribution of mirrors, but  I think that any download 
statistics would be better than none.

Clearly, we can do both of these things with Hackage, and I think they'd 
be very useful (particularly the voting).  Another small but useful 
thing that Hackage is missing is a notion of how fresh a package is. 
You have to hand-construct an URL to get a directory listing from Apache 
to find out how old a particular release a tarball is.

	<b