On Thu, 19 May 2011, Andrew Coppin wrote:
To all the people who look at Hackage, see that there are 6 different libraries for processing Unicode text files, and claim that this is somehow a *good* thing, I offer the above essay as a counter-example.
Recently I searched for an advanced way of handling command-line arguments, and found several packages on Hackage. Unfortunately they are all in different categories, what makes the categories almost useless. The second thing I checked, is the online Haddock documentation in order to see, whether the API makes sense to me. I like to know, how many extensions are required (I prefer Haskell 98) and how clean the package is written, e.g. I think that something simple as command-line parsing should be possible without an unsafe function. In the end I found none of the packages to fit my needs and I stuck to plain GetOpt.
Package ratings by certain criterias or by user votes would not help me much. Instead I like to get the information quickly, that helps me deciding, what package fits my needs best. E.g. Hackage could display the extensions used by a package, but it cannot just list the ones listed in the Cabal file, since modules can switch on extensions individually and also the extensions required by imported packages are needed. Maybe Hackage could allow to list or even rank packages according to criteria given by the user. In contrast to that, universal ratings would not help me much, but may frustrate authors, who's packages get bad ratings, because the expectations of its users differ from the ones of the author.
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