[Haskell-cafe] Library Repository?

[Bryan Burgers]

Recently, I have seen a few messages to Haskell Cafe (Like Marc
Weber's "Is there any url lib?" and Ferenc Wagner's "LDIF output
library", as well as many replies like "oh, you can find that library
at this link...") that have prodded me to ask what I've been wondering
for a long time.

What are the pros and cons of having a library repository for Haskell
libraries.  At current, I'm thinking of Perl's CPAN, which many Perl
experts claim is the most important aspect of Perl ("Don't reinvent
the wheel" is a common reply at Perlmonks.org), and I believe Ruby has
something similar (RubyGems?).  It seems to me that with the emergence
of Cabal as a standard way to package Haskell libraries, this could be
possible.

Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of pros and cons I came up with.

Pros:
 * Localized place to find libraries.  If I want to know if a urllib
exists, I can go to the server and search for 'url' and come up with
relevant libraries.
 * Encourages programmers to share their libraries.  If there's a
place to put libraries, I would imagine that some people who have good
libraries lying around might put them there.  Or if they have
something close, they might generalize it into a library and put it
there.

Cons:
 * It obviously needs a server, which costs money, and other things
like that cost money.
 * Personel.  It would take a bit of initiative to start a project
like this, as well as continued upkeep.  That would either require
some knowledgable volunteers, or, once again, money.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of the community on this.

Bryan