Hello everyone!
Half a year ago I’ve looked for elm package categorization site. I could not find any. So I made my own. And then @alexkorban created Elm package catalog. I don’t have as much time as Alex to make it even on par with his site. It’s not even worth to try since this this is already great site which I used a few times.
So now I question existence of Elm finder and what should be it’s purpose. Because currently it’s not worth to invest my time into something that is obviously not worth it and I’m thinking of shutting it down. But I invested some time into this and I want to know if someone would find it useful.
I can just shut it down and make it permanent redirect to Elm package catalog until domain expires. There are a few places on the web which use link to it so it would be a pity to break those links. Cloudflare can handle that redirect for me so it’s the easiest option.
Since I have in my DB all elm packages with docs for 0.19 and 0.19.1 I could expose it via REST API. So you would be able to use it for any purpose you would like. This would not be that hard and time consuming.
Make it good testing place for UI for Elm packages. So I would completely remove categorization thing. This would simplify things a lot and save a lot of time. But this approach has problems. It’s the most time consuming of the three. I also don’t have any idea how better version of Elm packages should look like.
I liked elm-finder a lot. Mostly because I could define my own categories. But you are right, the effort Alex put in makes elm-finder obsolete. Therefore, I feel like shutting down elm-finder is okey. That said, I dislike the idea, that Alex alone is responsible for categorizing all packages of Elm. And adding to that, the Elm package Catalog has also no search function. So i’m currently mostly using Elm Greenwood and browser bookmarks to group packages.
Personally, I feel like a better solution would be to add tags in the elm.json file and then the package owners would be responsible for grouping their own packages.
It’s a shame that you want to shut it down, although I understand your rationale. Elm finder seems a more complete solution compared to Elm Package Catalog:
Friendlier UI/styling (going forward/backward breaks navigation in EPC, it always reverts to the “Algorithms/data structures” category)
Its located under the category “SVG”. But yeah finding things that you do not know exist, is difficult because sometime the category does not match with the once in your head (For example a “Geometrie” category would be the one I would look for to find ianmackenzie/elm-geometry , instead it is in the category “Maths”)
Actually the Elm Package Catalog IS complete. You can find every package that is not yet categorized under the category “New”. And I must give Alex some props here: I published a new package last night and today it was already categorized.
I don’t want to have a service like this online. It’s not complete and I don’t want people to connect something bad with my name. And as I’ve said there is not big reason to keep the site alive.
So I’m going to let it die.
If this happens my site would make sense again because it would mean you as a maintainer of a package can choose where your package will show up. Python has something like this and npm has too. That would be great. Maybe a feature request to new version of Elm?
At the least, that might give EPC time catch up on some of those issues.