[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 21:49 -0800, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> 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.

I'd like to see hackage maintain download stats and have cabal-install
report build success and failures (with build logs) along with basic
config info like versions of deps, platform, compiler etc.

This could make a great distributed testing system.

> 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.

Yes, I would like to see activity info for each package. What I'd really
like to see is each package linking to it's darcs repo and generating an
activity graph using dons's darcs-graph program. Though I'd also like to
annotate the graph with marks for each release.

Duncan