Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
Some random thoughts triggered by this thread
1. I've been bowled over by the creativity unleashed by having a central site
(Hackage), with a consistent installation story (Cabal), where you can upload
packages with no central intervention. A single issue of the Haskell Weekly
(sic) News with 60 library announcements represents a qualitative shift from
the Haskell situation 2 years ago. That is fantastic.
I wasn't here 2 years ago. I'll take your word. :-)
2. We absolutely must not conflate GHC releases with QA-stamped library
bundles. The latter would be great, but the two must be separate. (For
reasons given by others in this thread.)
It's got my vote...
3. I think it'd be great if there were bundles of libraries that work
together, are available on multiple platforms, and have had some QA testing.
(Sounds as if releasing such bundles on a regular basis is the Gnome model.)
Its not clear to me that any one is actually volunteering to lead such a thing
though.
I would suggest that this depends on just how much work is going to be
involved.
4. Meanwhile, we could get a lot more mileage from de-centralised approaches.
Ideas I saw in this thread that sound attractive to me are to make Hackage
display, for each package:
- date of last update
- download statistics
- some kind of voting scores, so users can vote for
good packages (and add text comments, please)
- auto-build system, so that there's a per-platform indication of
whether the package builds; ideally, packages should come with
a test suite, which could be run too
(Is this list complete?) These things (or some subset) look more feasible to
me, because they can each be done with a finite effort, and then computers and
library users will do the rest.
I'm going to throw a few more in...
- I see that HackageDB shows me "other versions" of each package ( =
Good Thing). I don't see a changelog, or any way to easily determine
what actually changed between versions. Am I being blind, or is this
something we should think about adding?
- Someone else already suggested this but... should Hackage host a bug
tracker for individual packages too? (Would potentially make it easier
to figure out where to post bugs in Random Package X.)
- Linking to darcs? Actual darcs hosting? (Maybe make it even more
trivial to press a button to say "package what I've got in darcs right
now as version X".)
Just some ideas.
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