[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] ANN: Portackage - a hackage portal

[Andrew Seniuk]

Excuse the delay, I have no home internet.

> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 1:16 AM,  <briand at aracnet.com> wrote:
> Great idea.  Maybe the format can start as compactly as possible,
> i.e. 1 entry per line to make it easy to browse as many entries
> as possible in one page.
>
> It looks as though disabling just the dependencies would go a
> long way to accomplish that.

Yep, and in fact the version I uploaded while reading your
message has the deps column elided (and one or two others).
Enforcing single-line rows is a but a few tweaks away.

The thing is, the module namespace was the main motivator for
this project, so I'm also seeing whether I can get away with a
single view, package-oriented as presently, and still give good
focus to the modules names.

Soon I hope to include "accordion" views of the module namespace,
with cookie-based (?) persistent state so user's collapse/expand
tree state is preserved.

> I'd like to vote to make the synopsis to be the second column.
>
> will each column type have an enable/disable ?

I like the idea (although that one wasn't in the upload).
Hopefully when I explore the JavaScript UI tools a bit more,
the columns (key structure) will be totally configurable
by drag-and-drop, with columns sizable, and keys selected from
a listbox. (?) stuff like that

> it's probably best if a click on a specific target, say the actual
> name of the package, sends you to the hackage entry instead of a
> click anywhere on the row.  I find myself clicking on the page
> by accident and it sending me off to some random hackage entry.

:) That's a feature!

But seriously, you're right, and as a bonus the links can be
specific to the columns (package -> hackage, modules -> API pages,
homepages -> hps, maintainer -> sendto [1]).

(A 2-finger or Mod- click anywhere on a row might still be nice, but
a bare tap is admittedly way too accident prone with touch input.)

> I really like the idea - makes your hackage surfing
> much more enjoyable !
>
> Brian

And thank-you for sharing your thoughts! I'm committed to improving
it, until the ideas run out.

> On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Christoph Breitkopf <chbreitkopf at googlemail.com> wrote:
> this already looks great. So here's my wish-list, in case you have
> too much time on yours hands ;-)

Thanks! Yes I suppose I do have too much time on my hands, but the
pain of that is conterbalanced by all the excitement.

> Quality/popularity indicators (I'm aware that some of these are
> real work and better provided by hackage itself):
> - used by how many other packages (number of edges to that package
>    in the dependency graph of all packages)
> - haddock coverage, test coverage, etc.
> - like, +1, whatnot button
> - link to issue tracker, if there is one

If there's interest, this could become integrated with hackage
at some point in the future.

Next thing is to get a "last upload" field which can replace
the version field. The codependency graph :) would be a nice metric
to add, I'll look into it. I remember seeing a package that does
this someplace on hackage. The +1 button is a good one!

In short I'll try to implement all these ideas, thanks to you both
for the encouraging comments.

-Andrew

[1] I omitted the maintainer column, thinking its inclusion might
     be harmful, making the emails so easy for a bot to collect.