[Haskell-cafe] Some thoughts about Hackage

[Vasyl Pasternak]

Hi,

Yesterday Max complained about documentation for many Haskell modules.
But I found another similar problem with Hackage.

Before coding some Haskell program I try to find most appropriate
libraries, which help me to do task more efficiently. But the problem,
that there are to many libraries with similar functionality (for
example - networking, web servers etc.). And to find the best solution
is not so obvious.

My idea is to improve Hackage to help everyone with package selecting.
I propose the following:

- add download counter for each package, it could show how popular the
package is

- allow registered users set the quality mark of the package (from 1
to 5) and show the average mark of each packet

- add counter which shows how many packages depend on this package
(direct/indirect)

- create an aggregate package rank (a function on previous three
values), similar to Google's PageRank, i. e. rank of the package is
proportional to the package mark and weighted rank of dependent
packages

- allow comments on the package page, so anyone could tell its opinion
or other useful info for this package. All messages should be
delivered to the maintainer. This is useful, because it could speedup
the feedback on the packages, and also could form large knowledge base
on each package. Now everyone, who wants to read more about some
package should use Google to extract info from HaskellWiki,
Haskell-Cafe or hundreds of blog posts from different authors.

What do you think ?

Best regards,
Vasyl Pasternak