[Haskell-cafe] The Future of MissingH

Bulat Ziganshin bulat.ziganshin at gmail.com
Sun Nov 26 14:54:33 EST 2006


Hello John,

Friday, November 24, 2006, 7:32:55 PM, you wrote:

> Josef Svenningsson posted a comment on my blog today that got me to
> thinking.  He suggested that people may be "intimidated by the size of
> MissingH, confused by the undescriptive name, and don't quite know what's
> in there."  And I think he's right.

first, is it possible to integrate MissingH inside existing core libs,
i.e. Haskell libs supported by Haskell community? i think that it will
be impossible if MissingH will hold its GPL status. i think that
such fundamental library as MissingH should be BSDified to allow use
it both in commercial and non-commercial code

if library will be not BSDified it can remain as a whole or be
splitted to smaller conceptual parts (strings, file system,
logging...) but these parts should remain separate from other haskell
libs and these features can't be made, say, part of a Haskell standard

if library will be BSDified, and somewhat "advertized". i hope that
its parts will start moving to the more specific libs of core set, say
HVFS system into the Files library, logging facilities into the Unix
library, so on

next. why your library isn't well recognized. i can suggest in each
announce of new library version write the full list of its features
or at least url to such advertizing page. second, are you included
your library in HCAR and hswiki/Libraries_and_tools pages? third,
while i personally prefer to read source code and fascinated with
quality of code documenting in your lib, most peoples prefer to read
Haddocks, which again should be made available on web

next, while you accept patches to the lib, this's not declared in your
announces. best way is just to open darcs repository - most peoples
thinks that having darcs repository and accepting patches is the same
thing :)  i can also propose you the idea that Pupeno, packager of
Streams library used - he included in the tgz files copy of darcs
repository, again facilitating use of darcs and developing new patches
for library

and, about WindowsCompat.hs - stat() function is available on Windows
and even used to implement getModificationTime :)

>   I initially wrote it that way to make resolving dependencies easier
>   for end users.

now Cabal handles this

> How could greater community participation be encouraged, while still
> encouraging quality control?

>   I have received some very good contributions to MissingH from people,
>   and that's been great.  I've also received some that just aren't that
>   great -- they don't have Haddock docs, the code is opaque, they
>   don't come with unit tests, etc.  

>   But by and large, I've been maintaining it mostly myself.

i think that this is more general question for all haskell core
libraries



-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com



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