[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Andrew Coppin]

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:
>   
>> (Unless you're suggesting that I should try to actually *fix* these
>> things. The way I figure it, if an army of developers who are already
>> experts on the subject haven't been able to fix it yet, it must be
>> extremely hard, and so there's no way *I* can fix it.)
>>     
>
> Or maybe they have other things to do (e.g. Duncan is working, finishing
> off his PhD thesis and answering queries like this; when do you expect
> him to get any hacking done? :p).
>   

I wonder... How many people are actually working on Cabal?

When I first started using Haskell, I got the impression that there were 
hundreds, maybe even thousands, of developers working on GHC. (After 
all, how else could you write such a huge codebase in less than two 
centuries?) But now it appears the number of active developers is nearer 
to 3. This is obviously a jaw-droppingly tiny number of people to be 
working on such a gigantic piece of software. If it's really true, it's 
amazing anything ever gets done at all!

So now I wonder about Darcs, Cabal, Haddock, Hackage, and all those 
other big projects. Do they really have a bazillion people working on 
them? Or is it just two blokes in their spare time? (And, more 
importantly, how do you find out?)