> Out of curiosity, how big is the user community? How many
> downloads of
> the software? How many are on this list?
There are ~700 people on the Haskell list, ~200 on glasgow-haskell-users and
~150 on hugs-users. About 160 people downloaded ghc-4.02 for Linux last
month, I'm waiting to find out how many people downloaded the new ghc-4.04
binaries which were released this month.
To follow up to Mark's original message, we've noticed that external
interest and support for GHC has been increasing steadily for a while. The
standard joke used to be that the number of GHC users was roughly equal to
its version number, which was even true for a while :)
Nowadays we regularly get useful contributions from the GHC community on our
mailing lists. We make a habit of integrating pretty much everything that
people send us, as long as it's not too controversial. I think the one big
thing that prompted the recent increase in the number of contributions has
been our move to an open-development model using CVS: now that the
power-users can update their source trees regularly from the master
repository and see exactly what we're up to, GHC development is much less of
a black box. Folk can send us patches that will integrate directly into our
working copies, making it much easier for us to accept external
contributions.
Regular contributors, or people involved in actively devloping one part of
the system, even get furnished with full read-write access to the
repository.
None of this is new, in fact it pretty much mirrors the FreeBSD development
model (and probably other projects too, KDE for one I think), but we've
found that so far it works well for GHC. Hugs is already in the process of
being moved to the same repository, so hopefully we'll see a similar
increase in contributions there too.
Cheers,
Simon
