Thoughts on the Contributing page

[Tobias Dammers]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2019 at 12:54:51PM -0500, Ben Gamari wrote:
> >
> Sounds like we are largely in agreement. Let's start on this after the
> Trac migration is finished.

I can in fact start working on this already while the migration is
pipelined. It's just markdown in git, so writing a draft and then
merging it into the wiki is perfectly straightforward.

> I was going to recommend we rather just use something off-the-shelf to
> avoid reinventing the wheel. I use linkchecker [1] elsewhere and it
> works quite well. I believe you can use its -W flag to catch
> non-existent wiki pages (which won't return a 404).

Ofc, if we can do it without any extra coding effort, all the better.

I do think doing it as part of the migration script might make it easier
to capture those "redirect" pages (e.g.
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Newcomers): we're scraping anyway,
so I think detecting the shape of those pages shouldn't be overly
difficult, and might be something an off-the-shelf link checker isn't as
suitable for.