[Haskell] HaskellForge

[Brian Smith]

On 5/13/05, Gour <haskell_list at atmarama.org> wrote:
> So, why not form HaskellForge and thereby form powerful Haskell
> alliance, ie.  common site which can host many/most present Haskell
> projects offering appropriate web & other (eg. darcs) services?
> 
> If we take a look on new HCAR, we can see that many Haskell projects are
> scattered all around, so it would be nice to have them on one place.

On the other hand, I bet that the majority of developers here also
develop software using languages other than Haskell. Further, if these
people are like me, then I would want to keep all of my projects in
the same place, regardless of implementation language. That is, I
don't think that people would want to host their Haskell projects at
HaskellForge, Java projects at Java.net, Ruby projects at RubyForge,
etc. I think that these language-specific sites are best reserved for
infrastructure projects like compilers and reusable libraries.

For end-user applications like Darcs, which are useful to people
outside the Haskell community, hosting on a language-specific site
makes less sense. For example, what if Darcs was rewritten in C++ or
ML? It would be the same application as far as its users are concerned
(ignoring psychological issues) but it wouldn't fit at HaskellForge
anymore. Or, less drastically, if someone were to develop a GUI for
Darcs written in C++ (like TortoiseSVN) or in Java (an IDE plug-in),
would these projects belong at HaskellForge?

Based on this reasoning, I think that if the existing hosting sites
are not sufficient to handle Haskell projects (e.g. because they don't
support Darcs), then it would make more sense to work with an existing
hosting site to improve Haskell support. Then, tools like Hackage
could be designed to interoperate seamlessly with these existing
hosting sites. If nothing else, it would be less work, and presumably
the effort would benefit a larger group of people (not just Haskell
advocates).

Regards,
Brian