Status of Packages, Tools, and Libraries (was: FFI and ODBC connectivity)

[Claus Reinke]

> > Is HaskellDB dead? Is it worth extending?
> > Is HaskellDirect dead or superseeded by the Haskell FFI?
> > I am having difficulty discovering which FFI technology/package is
> > still useful, viable and alive,
> 
> You have of course looked at http://haskell.org/?  While development
> of libraries has to be rather fluid and dynamic, I think it would be a
> good idea for the web pages trying to keep track of packages seeing
> active use and development, and in particular marking packages that
> are useful but orphaned, or superceded by other packages.  Some kind
> of status field, perhaps?

(see http://www.mail-archive.com/haskell@haskell.org/msg07009.html
for my own old suggestion about this old problem)
 
> Something for the communities report?

:-)
to be found at: http://www.haskell.org/communities/

In a sense, the reports already do part of this, apart from:

- while the communities report serves as an established format for
  prompting software authors/maintainers to tell the world what they've
  been up to (and to update their own pages;), it would still be nice if
  the status information collected there would make its way into the
  libraries/tools listings on haskell.org (a simple marker: "maintained by
  X; last heard of  in Nov 2001" would be a start), together with the 
  kind of information you suggest.

- not everyone bothers to submit anything to the communities reports,
  in spite of invitations from the editor, so some very active projects
  might not be represented in the most recent edition. Starting last
  time, I explicitly invite "project pings" (just stating a contact, and that 
  the project is still actively maintained), but even that doesn't get some
  people out of their holes..

So the communities reports do offer some help here, but there is still
a lot of room for improvement, much of which beyond the reports..

Cheers,
Claus