[Haskell] Been there, it's great. Let's do it again, Re: HaskellForge

[Shae Matijs Erisson]

Samuel Bronson <naesten at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm sure most of us have used CVS and/or SVN with existing projects
> (or before darcs, or for things which need to run everywhere and not
> just where GHC runs), and some of us probably don't like darcs, but
> that doesn't mean others of us don't feel the need for darcs hosting.

I can attest to this. 
I've been hosting various darcs repos and mirros for some people on #haskell.
I had a GForge test installation on ScannedInAvian.org years ago.
I hacked in darcs support by slightly modifying the ssh key submission to allow
submission of GPG keys. It's easy to get an ugly but working solution.

Thesis: The Haskell community needs a HaskellForge.

Point: Users can't find libraries and their details.
Counterpoint: Hackage will cover that for smaller projects.

Supporting evidence: 

I recently asked someone why they chose OCaml over Haskell. They said it's
because OCaml has a wider range of libraries, especially OpenGL and SDL
bindings. I know that Haskell has both of those, but it would appear that he
couldn't find them.

Here's a regular scavenger hunt you can see in the #haskell logs. 

What's the difference between HOpenGL and OpenGL? Where are the docs? Which one
is included with the ghc6 debs? I'm not picking on HOpenGL specifically, I can
think of lots of projects where details are hard to find (my code too!).
Some others that come to mind are SOEGraphics and Yampa / Yampa Arcade.

Coming at it from the other direction, can you figure what projects are on
haskell.org? How many project webpages can you find without Google?

I think the biggest lack is a searchable index of packages and details.

A HaskellForge would have a searchable index of projects, but so will Hackage.
But, hackage and cabal are more like deb/rpm than sourceforge.
Hackage will never cover mailing lists, forums, or bug/feature trackers.

So, I guess it depends on what you think the Haskell community needs.
-- 
It seems I've been living two lives. One life is a self-employed web developer
In the other life, I'm shapr, functional programmer.  | www.ScannedInAvian.com
One of these lives has futures (and subcontinuations!)|  --Shae Matijs Erisson