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

[Ivan Perez]

There's no need to keep them on a separate page.

If the purpose of keeping them around (on the same or on a separate page)
is to make people aware that these methods exist, putting them away on a
separate page achieves none of the goals (near to no awareness) and has the
same drawbacks in terms of effort required.

It's sufficient to keep them on the same page in a separate section. If you
are clean and organized, nobody will be confused or distracted.

Ivan

On Sun, 3 Apr 2022 at 14:29, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net> wrote:

> On 03/04/2022 20.10, Tom Ellis wrote:
> > 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"
> >
>
> I did read the OP. My point was simply that it might be acceptable to
> have half-working (or whatever) instructions if they were squirreled
> away behind a link + disclaimer. That might be better for people who
> (for whatever reason) don't want either of the officially supported
> methods.
>
> Regards,
>
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