[Haskell-cafe] The state of Hackage: what are we doing about it?

[Don Stewart]

si:
> Don wrote
> 
> > I see fairly regular complaints about too many Haskell libraries,
> > bewildering choice of difficult-to-determine quality.
> >
> > I've tried to summarize the state of Hackage, and what projects are
> > active to make it easier to find high quality libraries:
> >
> >     http://tinyurl.com/2cqw9sb
> >
> > Thoughts?
> 
> the Hayoo! group is currently extending the search engine, such that it 
> becomes possible, to not only search types and functions, but also search the
> package descriptions. Building a search index for the cabal package 
> description is already implemented. At the moment the Hayoo! search interface 
> is is the missing part. Technically it's not a difficult extension, but 
> currently we don't have very much spare time.
> 
> For ranking the results for a package search, a download statistic could be 
> very useful and could easily be integrated. If such a statistic would be 
> available in machine readable format (csv, xml, plain text, ...), we could 
> integrate that.
> 

I've been posting CSV files of the download statistics here:

   http://www.galois.com/~dons/hackage/hackage-downloads.csv

The next quarter's aggregated downloads are due soon.

The Arch Haskell site uses these stats to compute some popularity
metrics:
    
    http://www.galois.com/~dons/arch-haskell-status.html

-- Don