[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:

> 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?)

Seeing as how we don't have a bazillion people using Haskell... ;-)

My understanding is that Cabal, Haddock, Hackage (as in the web
infrastructure, etc.) and GHC all have a small core team of about 3
developers and a whole bunch of people who have committed patches at one
time or another and might even do so on an irregular basis.  Darcs seems
to have a larger team behind it.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com