purescript/pursuit

Package list: show more package information

jamesdbrock opened this issue · 3 comments

The Pursuit package list is long, and it's a bit difficult to discover which packages are reliable and well-regarded.

On the front page packages list, I would like to see

  • GitHub About line
  • GitHub stars
  • If this package is in package-sets. Also number of packages in package-sets which transitively depend on this one.
  • Owner of the package, with a special highlight for purescript or purescript-contrib.
  • Possibly some of the other stuff offered by the GitHub REST API: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos

Also I think we should drop the three-column alphabetic layout. It's cute but it doesn't work well with lots of packages. We should switch to a table with the above columns.

See also #292 #267 #220 #147

I think depending on the GitHub API was a mistake and I don't want to do anything that will tie us any more strongly to GitHub. In my view, Pursuit should only display information that already exists in the registry. I also don't love the idea of a big table, really, or at least I don't think a big table like that should be the front page. If the list is too long that the current design is becoming unwieldy, then I'd prefer to just move it to a separate page and instead just have a few links we think people are likely to find useful on the front page.

Do you think it would be good for the package list to include information like this? If that information did not come from the GitHub API?

I think including descriptions would be good, but I'd prefer we use the description field in the package manifest, not the GitHub about line. I'm unsure about GitHub stars, because I don't want authors to feel forced to put their libraries on GitHub because they'll look dead/unused otherwise. I'm on board with including something like "most recent package set containing this package".