

Too many Haskell libraries. What are we going to do about it? - dons
http://donsbot.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/there-are-a-hell-of-a-lot-of-haskell-libraries-now-what-are-we-going-to-do-about-it/

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tumult
I'd really like to see a more powerful web interface to Hackage. For example,
if I'm looking to pick out a library to use for something, I'd like to be able
to filter the listings down to just the ones that build on GHC 6.12. Or the
ones that have received an update within the last year. Or, for example,
filter out packages with explicit parsec-2 dependencies, since I use 3 now.

Maybe there could be some kind of 'gold star' that would show up next to the
package name in the listing if your package meets a certain number of
requirements. Builds on most recent stable release of GHC, no outdated
dependencies, no dead link to homepage, has a maintainer. Maybe not those
exact requirements, but I think encouraging the community to meet a high bar
of compatibility and portability is healthy.

Is there a rule against scraping Hackage? I am liking this idea.

~~~
dons
You can scrape Hackage. The most efficient way is "cabal list" and its friends
(access the Cabal database directly).

I do that for the Arch Linux package status page:
<http://www.galois.com/~dons/arch-haskell-status.html>

Using
[http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/archlinux/0.3/do...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/archlinux/0.3/doc/html/Distribution-
ArchLinux-Report.html#v%3AloadPackageIndex)

~~~
tumult
Excellent, thanks

------
stonemetal
The thing about just pulling the number of packages on Hackage is a large
number of them are actually applications. I am lazy so the first section that
proves my point is AI 9 entries. 3 libraries, 3 programs, 3 that list
themselves as both program and lib. Other sections are similarly app full.
Depending on how well separated the app and lib are in the app+lib category
you could be looking at more than half of that package count being
applications not libs.

~~~
dons
Your point is well taken.

Here's a quick script. Libs that also ship programs are counted twice, but we
get:

    
    
       2139 libraries
        455 programs
    

So, no, its more like 25% programs, 75% libs.

~~~
stonemetal
I still don't think we are in quite the situation you imagine. As a for
instance check out distributed computing in hackage 18 entries, great right?
Number of actual projects 4, 13 entries are for Happs. Opengl has a separate
entry for its test cases. There is a large number of unimportant random junk
packages in hackage. The main problem with hackage is that I need to figure
out which of the 30 GTK packages I need before I can use GTK.

