The state of Hackage: what are we doing about it?

[Matthias Kilian]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 04:13:20PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
> I've tried to summarize the state of Hackage, and what projects are
> active to make it easier to find high quality libraries:
> 
>     http://tinyurl.com/2cqw9sb
> 
> Thoughts?

Some (maybe stupid) ideas for what could be help people to decide
which stuff to use:

- "Liveness" of a library, that is: does it still get updates? Does it
  build with recent versions of GHC? (I think freshmeat has something
  like this, but I'm not sure how useful it is in reality)

- Reverse dependencies -- how many other libraries and/or programs are
  using this library (Maybe something for Hackage-2.0)? Also: Average
  liveness (and probably other metrics) for "near"  reverse
  dependencies, so if you have 100 libraries depending on each other but
  are just old and dead stuff, they will get "scored down".

- Part of the Haskell Platform? Those libraries should get some extra
  marker (including to which version of the Haskell Platform they
  belong).

I know, the mere usage count of a library isn't necessarily a sign
of quality, but if you have some old stuff that's not used by
anything and doesn't implement some very special/exotic feature,
it's probably not worth looking at.

Ciao,
	Kili