[Haskell-cafe] RFC: removing “alternative installation methods” from haskell.org (or finding them owners)

[Tom Ellis]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 07:57:47PM +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
> On 03/04/2022 19.34, Tom Ellis wrote:
> > Well, good question, but back at you: who are you discouraging from
> > Haskell by keeping a large number of complex, unmaintained, possibly
> > completely wrong, installation instruction on the Downloads page?
> 
> I have no strong feelings either way, but would it perhaps be viable to
> just leave that "Alternative installation options" as a simple link to a
> separate page perhaps be sufficent to guide people to use either of the
> two 'main' options while still leaving the alternatives semi-documented?
> Has that been considered?
> 
> (I think just adding a disclaimer that the 'alternative methods' are not
> supported per se, but perhaps simultaneously encouraging corrections
> might be a way to lessen the maintenance burden?)

The problem that I am trying to solve is that no one with maintenance
responsibility for the haskell.org website knows if those alternative
installation methods work, are up-to-date, are currently supported by
the (external) teams that put them together, etc..  It is not doing
right by the community to publish information that we cannot support
or verify.

If someone is willing to be the "owner" of a particular installation
method, to ensure it is kept up to date and high quality, then we'll
keep it!  To reiterate what I said in my first email, we can ...

"Keep (some of) the alternative installation options and find
community volunteers to maintain them. The volunteers will be
responsible for ensuring verifying on a regular basis that their
instructions are still working, submitting timely corrections when
necessary, and responding promptly on the issue tracker to questions
about their installation instructions"

Tom