[Haskell-cafe] idea: ratings (or maybe comments) for packages in hackage

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

The following is happening to me very often:

- I decide to do some work in Haskell and decide to do it using a library.
- I go to hackage and search for some keywords, find 10 different
packages that does similar things.
- In that moment, I need to apply some heuristics to decide which
package to use. When my heuristics don't end up with only one package,
I go to Haskell IRC channel and ask people there to which library to
use.


My heuristic is something like:

- Look if author/maintainer is well-known people in Haskell community
that are already produced very high-quality libraries.
- Make sure it's currently maintained(updated at least in past few months)
- Make sure it has Github repository.
- some other stuff like that.

These heuristics are not working great, most of the time I'm ending up
with IRC channel. So my proposal is this:

Why not have a rating/comment system for packages in hackage, so that
when I need to find a library for something I can just look to
comments or ratings to see how complete/well-implemented or what does
it good for etc. (for example, we have several high quality xml
parsers, some of them are for performance while some of them aiming
for being easy to use)

Any comments would be appreciated.


---
Ömer Sinan Ağacan
http://osa1.net