[ghc-steering-committee] Haddock

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Good thought. Personally, I'd be happy to have a Haddock maintainer on the committee;
but I'd like them to be a full member, contributing to the discussion and shepherding proposals -- not merely acting as the Haddock liaison.

Simon

|  -----Original Message-----
|  From: ghc-steering-committee <ghc-steering-committee-bounces at haskell.org>
|  On Behalf Of Richard Eisenberg
|  Sent: 18 June 2020 22:29
|  To: ghc-steering-committee <ghc-steering-committee at haskell.org>
|  Subject: [ghc-steering-committee] Haddock
|  
|  Hi committee,
|  
|  With a steady level of activity adding new features to GHC, I fear we may
|  be forgetting one important downstream client: Haddock. For a nice
|  example of how our decisions can cause trouble, see
|  https://github.com/goldfirere/singletons/issues/466#issuecomment-
|  646117067. Despite appearing on the singletons bug tracker, that comment
|  is all about Haddock support for https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-
|  proposals/blob/3dfec03b11e8829d7febbb7290c3183f752466d7/proposals/0054-
|  kind-signatures.rst, the -XStandaloneKindSignatures extension.
|  
|  This makes me wonder: should we invite a maintainer of Haddock to be an
|  ex-officio (and voting) member of the committee? This would have two
|  salutary effects:
|  - It would force us to consider an important aspect of the user
|  experience -- reading documentation -- of newly proposed features.
|  - It would force us to give Haddock a heads-up about new features they
|  may want to incorporate.
|  
|  If we don't think we need an ex-officio committee member, then perhaps we
|  should instead require future proposals to describe a plausible impact on
|  Haddock. I say "plausible impact" to suggest that the proposal text would
|  not be binding on Haddock (which would be awfully dictatorial of us), but
|  that it gives Haddock a starting place to consider their own design,
|  while forcing proposers to think about this important-but-easily-
|  neglected aspect of language evolution.
|  
|  What do we think?
|  
|  Richard
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