[Haskell-cafe] A cabal odyssey

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Daniel Fischer <daniel.is.fischer at web.de> writes:

> On Saturday 21 August 2010 14:57:26, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
>> > Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:
>> >> 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... ;-)
>>
>> I don't know - how many packages are on Hackage now? That's a few GB of
>> source code, right? It didn't write itself. ;-)
>>
>
> How many people have hackage accounts? Much fewer than a bazillion (I 
> think, how much is a bazillion anyway?).
> Some of them are *very* productive.

A Bazillion is an imaginary number meant to indicate something extremely
large: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazillion#-illion

Since the population of the planet is roughly 6 Billion, I would guess
that Andrew is under the miscomprehension that aliens make up the vast
majority of Haskell users (or else he is taking into account everyone
who will ever use Haskell as well, since after all Haskell will
eventually replace all other inferior languages to become the One True
Language!).

>> > 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.
>>
>> OK, wow. Makes you wonder how anything ever gets done at all, eh?
>>
>
> It's a kind of magic.

I believe Don wrote a successor to lambdabot to generate all of his
libraries for him, and Galois is just a front to make it appear that
multiple people are working on these libraries when in reality it's just
his bot.

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