andrewcoppin: > Ketil Malde wrote: > >I think this is the problem, not the solution. There is a lot of DB > >libraries, just like there are a multitude of XML libraries, several > >collections, etc. Too many libraries are written as research projects > >or by grad students, and left to rot after release. The fragmentation > >also means that few libraries see any extensive testing - I was a bit > >surprised that apparently none of the XML libraries can handle files > >larger than a few megabytes, for instance. > > > >You're probably right that one of them would work, but especially new > >users will have no way of knowing which one. Only after the user > >has given up do people post similar experiences. > > > >This is getting better, of course - hackage will grow usage > >and activity statistics and perhaps ratings, the wiki will be extended > >with recommendations, more people will get involved in development. > >But at the moment, this is a problem. > > > > This is one of the more frustrating aspects of Haskell. It's not that > nobody has written DB bindings - they most certainly have. It's not that > nobody has written compression or cryptography bindings - they have. > It's that there is a small zoo of them, and it's really hard to pick out > which ones are the "good" ones. I really hope this does improve in time. > (And I really wish I could do something positive to make this happen...)
We have the start on a solution for how to pick "the good ones". * Go to Hackage * Click on the 'experimental search interface' http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/search.html * Click on 'advanced search': http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/advancedsearch.html * Type the name of the library you're interested in, into the "required-by" field. We'll consider which binary IO library is most popular, from: * binary * NewBinary * safecopy The search engine returns the results: * binary, is used by 12 other packages: bencode, Etherbunny,GrowlNotify, harchive hmp3, hpaste, HPDF, infinity safecopy, tar, torrent, htar * NewBinary, is used by 4 other packages: ASN1, Crypto, GrowlNotify, Hmpf * safecopy, is used by 0 packages. So choose Data.Binary if you trust the wisdom of the crowd. So as a crude heuristic for measuring what the masses are saying, this seems reasonable. -- Don _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe