[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Haskell Communities & Activities Report (10th ed., June 2006)

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Andres,

Monday, June 12, 2006, 8:19:54 PM, you wrote:

>               Haskell Communities and Activities Report
>                      (10th edition, June 2006)

thank you for this huge work, Andres!

can you please add to the list of "competitors" information about
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools page? due to
the great work done by Donald Bruce Stewart now it almost reflects 
full state-of-the-art in these areas. he wrote the following to me in
April:

======================================
About a month ago I went through the entire HWN archives, the haskell@
archives back to 1990 (Check the Old_news page!) and the last HCAR,
adding over 100 entries to the libraries page.

So, I argue it is the most complete list we have.

And if anything's missing, you know how to edit the wiki.
======================================



now i return to the discussion about all these "competitors". imagine
that i am Johnny the developer which wrote great Stream library. now i
want to make information about it available to all interested souls.
what should i do?

1) write announcement to mail list
2) write tiny description for HWN (now Donald does this for us)
3) put information to the haskellwiki/Libraries_and_tools page
4) upload it to the Hackage
5) after half year, write description for HCAR

too much, i think. and HCAR is in bad position here because it
refreshed only once for 6 months and need centralized work. i prefer
medias that is "real-time" and can be updated by anyone interested.
wiki seems the best candidate for this role, but it is just
unstructured text, it doesn't allow to extract, for example,
information about new projects for last week, or look only at libs
that supports both Hugs and GHC.

so, the best media will be some sort of online database, like CPAN.
it should

- have enough fields to allow any required searches - by date of
publication, category, author
- automatically extracts this information from cabal files
- support various entry types, such as individuals, papers and all
other mentioned in current HCAR
- allow anyone to add new entries, with or without uploading actual
implementations

this database should allow to find information about all
the new/updated packages for last week, making possible automatic
generation of this HWN part. in this case to announce his work,
developer should just describe it at this server, and then

1) automatic announcement for this mail list will be generated
2) next week HWN will automatically include description of this package
3) anyone interested to see new/updated packages for last year or last
month can run appropriate query on this server site
4) anyone who want to see full list of described packages or list
split by categories can do it again using this site interface

the good news is what we already have this database - yes, it's HCAR
itself, what is internally keeps as database, afaik. it has many
fields required, although we should add more following the .cabal
file structure. so we can start this online database just
now. the only thing required is the web interface for
editing/searching data

the next important things will be keeping history of updates
(especially version updates to allow search for libraries whose major
version was updated during, for example, last 6 months); adding
"subscription to package" that allows to be warned via email when
libraries i interested are updated; interaction with Hackage


-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com