[Haskell-cafe] Hackage checking maintainership of packages

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi,

Petr Pudlák wrote:
>     ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>     From: *Niklas Hambüchen* <mail at nh2.me <mailto:mail at nh2.me>>
>     Date: 2013/5/4
>     ...
>     I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a
>     quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?"
>     for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better
>     indications concerning this.
>
>
> This sounds to me like a very good idea. It could be as simple as "If
> you consider yourself to be the maintainer of package X please just hit
> reply and send." If Hackage doesn't get an answer, it'd just would
> display some red text like "This package seems to be unmaintained since
> D.M.Y."

I like the idea of displaying additional info about the status of 
package development, but I don't like the idea of annoying hard-working 
package maintainers with emails about their perfect packages that 
actually didn't need any updates since ages ago.

So what about this: Hackage could try to automatically collect and 
display information about the development status of packages that allow 
potential users to *guess* whether the package is maintained or not. 
Currently, potential users have to collect this information themselves.

Here are some examples I have in mind:

  * Fetch the timestamp of the latest commit from the HEAD repo
  * Fetch the number of open issues from the issue tracker
  * Display reverse dependencies on the main hackage page
  * Show the timestamp of the last Hackage upload of the uploader

Tillmann