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

[Tom Ellis]

On Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 02:58:03PM -0400, Ivan Perez wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Apr 2022 at 14:48, Tom Ellis <tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017 at jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:
> > Yet, their work has not been (recently) confirmed working by those
> > responsible for maintaining www.haskell.org, nor do we have the
> > resources to perform such confirmations.
> 
> You (I don't mean necessarily you personally) are still making a decision

So far no decision has been taken.  The Haskell.org committee has a
made a proposal and is seeking community feedback.  Action will be
taken based on consideration of the feedback received.

> based on your lack of resources to determine if something is up to date. Is
> not that they are not up to date, it's that you don't know if they are (and
> you know that you don't know, since you are acknowledging it). But you are
> still willing to not list them.

You are correct that the proposal is to err on the side of removing
information that may be unhelpful, rather than keeping information
that may be helpful.  I prefer the former since it seems to strike a
good balance between providing a clear onboarding path to
inexperienced users, providing a uniform onboarding path to make
providing support easier, providing sufficient experieced users with a
wide range of options, and allowing maintenance by a small group of
volunteers with not much time on their hands.

That said, the current downloads page says

"EPEL 5 and 6 have ghc-7.0.4 and cabal-install-0.10.2"

and I know for a fact that is about five years out of date.  Indeed it
seems that EPEL 5 was EOLed in 2017

https://fedoramagazine.org/the-end-of-the-line-for-epel-5/

> Since people are putting a lot of effort into maintaining that work, by
> ignoring that (due to lack of resources) you are contributing to that
> compound effect I was describing. They are doing this for the community,
> but the community seems to ignore them.
> 
> I think it's more fair to acknowledge those efforts, to let people list
> what they think is useful for them.

I'm very much in favour of letting people list what they think is
useful for them, and to promote the OS packaging work that people have
put a lot of effort in to.  We simply need to find volunteers who are
willing to put in the effort to keep the information we provide
correct, up to date, and thus, useful.  Part of this proposal is to
reach out to potential volunteers.  Would you be willing to volunteer?
If so then please introduce yourself at the following GitHub
discussion:

https://github.com/haskell-infra/www.haskell.org/discussions/169

> If the problem is understanding if those methods still work, perhaps what
> we need is a mechanism to keep track of installation methods available and
> the last time they were verified. That detailed info can be used to keep
> the page up to date.

That sounds like a great idea. Would you be willing to implement that
idea?

Tom