[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Making Haskell more open

[Simon Marlow]

On 14 November 2005 08:32, Gour wrote:

> Nobody said that DocBook does not work fine. However let me quote
> SPJ's message:
> 
> <quote>
> However, I still wonder if there are things we could do that would
> make 
> it easier for people to contribute.  Here are two concrete
>   suggestions: ^^^^^^^
> - Make it possible for people to add comments, explanations, or
>   questions to
>         * The GHC user manual [currently generated using DocBook]
>         * The Haskell 98 Report
>   The idea would be that anyone could help improve these documents,
>                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>   and that, at least in the case of the GHC user manual, we could
>   use the comments to help clarify the text.
> </quote>
> 
> So, the whole discussion, at least from my side, was to offer
> suggestions to make it easier for more people to contribute to the
> whole haskell community.

With regard to the GHC user manual, I don't think the implication above
was that we should change the markup technology (at least, I agree with
Sven that DocBook XML is on the whole a reasonable solution).  

The idea was to make it easy for Joe Programmer to add his comments to
the manual, whether by a wiki link or some other clever user-editable
content mechanism.  In a separate stage the comments could be
incorporated into the manual proper by the developers, or just left in
place for the edification of other users.

Cheers,
	Simon