The Haskell Implementors Workshop was held in Baltimore, Oct 1, 2010. Duncan Coutts from Well-Typed and I presented a status report on the Haskell distribution infrastructure:

• The Haskell Platform
• Hackage
• Cabal

You can read the slides as PDF here, or online:

The amount of freely available Haskell code has grown exponentially in the past
two years as Hackage and Cabal have come online. Managing millions of Haskell
code, partitioned thousands of interdependent packages is a serious engineering
challenge that has received little attention from the language research community.
Meanwhile, new adopters of Haskell struggle to deal with the sheer number of
libraries and tools now available.

One pragmatic approach to managing this web is the Haskell Platform (HP), a
project to build a blessed, comprehensive set of libraries meeting objective
quality control criteria, and in doing so make expert recommendations on which
packages to use. In its first six weeks of operation the HP had over forty
thousand downloads.

The challenge with such a project is to manage the many conflict constraints
for diversity, coverage, and quality when assembling the package set. This talk
will outline the state of the Haskell Platform, the technical approaches taken
to build it, and the roadmap ahead.