Open up the issues tracker on ghc-proposals

[Anthony Clayden]

On Wed, 2 May 2018 at 8:28 PM, Simon Peyton Jones <redirect at vodafone.co.nz>
wrote:

> |  > Sometimes, a language extension idea could benefit from
> |  some community discussion before it's ready for a formal proposal.
> |
> |  Can I point out it's not only ghc developers who make proposals.

| I'd rather you post this idea more widely.
>

(I meant for David to post more widely the idea of using Github issues
tracker. Because I suspect the people who would most benefit from the
'community discussion' are not participants on ghc-devs.)


> The Right Thing is surely for the main GHC proposals pav[g]e
>         https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals
> to describe how you can up a "pre-proposal".  That is, document
> the entire process in one, easy to find, place.
>
> Mind you, I'm unclear about the distinction between a pre-proposal
> and a proposal. ...


Thanks Simon,

Speaking as a non-developer of ghc, often there's a bright idea with no
very clear notion how best it fits into Haskell, or could be implemented
effectively/efficiently:

* maybe it's something seen in another language;
* maybe the proposer finds themself writing the same boilerplate
repeatedly, and wonders if that's a common idiom the language could capture;
* sometimes it starts as more of a 'how do I do this?' question; then you
get told you can't; then other people chip in with 'yes I'd like to do that
too'.
* sometimes it's more of a niggle: this really annoys me/is awkward/is
confusing every time I bump into it/even though I can work round it.


 Both are drafts that invite community discussion,
> prior to submitting to the committee for decision.
>

I'm guessing as to why David raised the question. I've noticed (a minority
of) proposals generate a huge amount of discussion, a lot of which is: you
can already do that, or nearly all of that, or there's good reasons why
ghc/Haskell shouldn't do that. Then maybe the difficulty that needs
tackling is that the submitter isn't really following the process/perhaps
the process document should be clearer about what threshold of readiness
the ideas should be in before formalising(?) I'll try to avoid specifics
here, but two proposals I can think of essentially amounted to: Language
XXX has YYY; language XXX is similar to Haskell; I think YYY is great;
please put YYY in Haskell; P.S. I don't really understand ghc and all the
extensions it now offers.

As you've remarked yourself, sometimes the 'community discussion' gets so
convoluted and sidetracked it's impossible to make out where the proposal
is at, and whether all objections have been addressed. That's the point at
which IMO the proposal should be withdrawn and resubmitted as a 'fresh
start'.

OTOH, as I said, there's plenty of other forums those less
formal/pre-proposal discussions could happen. Some used to happen on
Trac/started life as bug reports -- which is rightfully discouraged.
_Could_ happen but often doesn't raise a response. What if Github issues
tracker just becomes another backwater where ideas go to get ignored?


AntC


>
> |  -----Original Message-----
> |  From: Glasgow-haskell-users <glasgow-haskell-users-
> |  bounces at haskell.org> On Behalf Of Anthony Clayden
> |  Sent: 02 May 2018 02:34
> |  To: glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org; ghc-devs at haskell.org
> |  Subject: Re: Open up the issues tracker on ghc-proposals
> |
> |  > On May 1, 2018, at 2:24 PM, David Feuer <david.feuer at
> |  gmail.com> wrote:
> |  >
> |  > Sometimes, a language extension idea could benefit from
> |  some community discussion before it's ready for a formal proposal.
> |
> |  Can I point out it's not only ghc developers who make proposals. I'd
> |  rather you post this idea more widely.
> |
> |  As a datapoint, I found ghc-users and the café just fine for those
> |  discussions.
> |  Ghc-users seems to have very low traffic/is rather wasted currently.
> |  And I believe a lot of people pre-discuss on reddit.
> |  For ideas that have been on the back burner for a long time, there's
> |  often wiki pages. (For example re Quantified
> |  Constraints.)
> |
> |  > I'd like to propose that we open up the GitHub issues
> |  tracker for ghc-proposals to serve as a place to discuss pre-proposal
> |  ideas. Once those discussions converge on one or a few specific plans,
> |  someone can write a proper proposal.
> |
> |  I'm not against that. There gets to be a lot of cruft on some
> |  discussions about proposals, so I'd expect we could archive it all
> |  once a proposal is more formalised.
> |
>
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