[Haskell-cafe] Re: Working out which library to use

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> 1. For certain tasks, there are multiple possible packages, and it's not
> really clear which one to go for. Having more than one choice is good.
> (E.g., there's Gtk2hs and there's wxHaskell, and you pick the one you
> want based on personal preference.) Having *dozens* of different
> packages for the same task, some more complete than others, some more
> maintained than others, etc., is just confusing.
> + points 3 and 4

This can be solved easily using blogs. If you use a package
successfully, blog about it. Write about how great it was, or what was
lacking. Say what problems you ran into. Perhaps write a slightly
tutorialish post saying what you used it for and a snippet of code. If
a few people do this, Google will do the rest with search results.


> 2. Most things on Hackage don't seem to want to work on Windows.
> (Evidently this is being worked on. Stream Fusion installed just fine
> with a little help from Duncan...)

Windows, the unloved Haskell platform... Not much you can do about
this, short of breaking into peoples houses and reformatting their
hard drive. I know most authors would be happy to accept a patch
fixing whatever issue there is - so all it needs is more Windows
users. Perhaps a wiki page listing the common mistakes a Linux user
can make to render their package non-working on Windows?

Thanks

Neil