[Haskell-cafe] What about adding a wiki for each haskell project?

[Thomas Hartman]

patch-tag.com has wikis now.

They are some buggy behaviors I still need to address so I haven't blogged
or otherwise drawn attention to it (arrrg) but my hope is that, quite soon,
this will be quite slick and quite useful.

2009/12/11 Marc Weber <marco-oweber at gmx.de>

> hackage is success because:
> a) many (most) people do use it (by uploading packages)
> b) it is a comprehensive list of availible packages if not the most
>    comprehensive one
>
> Duncan, can you write about your concerns briefly why some maintainers may
> dislike
> this idea ?
>
> Hackage is missing one feature:
> It is very static. I mean if you have a patch or a question or a comment
> you have to lookup the darcs repository, write the patch then contact
> the author and wait.. If the author replies everything is fine.
> If he doesn't you don't know what to do. And if he does your commitment
> still doesn't show up on hackage.
>
> Using a wiki page for each project enables anybody to add comments.
> I'm thinking about this kind of comments:
>
>  "Interlude doesn't work for me. It looks like the interlude.h file
>  passes a tuple to the reportError function which doesn't expect a tuple.
>  You can fix it by removing the "," in the .h file.
>  Try this patch:
>
> http://github.com/MarcWeber/haskell-nix-overlay/blob/master/patches/interlude-0.1.1.patch
>  "
>
>  Of course I mailed the author. Looking at the package again I noticed
>  that it was uploaded by someone else: GwernBranwen.
>  gwern on #haskell told me that the author is responsive so I'll just
>  wait some days, but others will try and fail as well.
>  If the other person is new to haskell he may not find the fix
>  fast. He just wants to know which of the heads is causing trouble..
>
> Another use case would be users adding
> "If you're interested in this topic also have a look at XXX"
>
> Yet another use case is someone figuring out that function X was removed
> in version Y. He could than add a note
>
> x vanished since v.10 and everybody who wants to update cabal dependency
> constraints doesn't have to download the darcs repo to figure out that
> he should use package <= v.10 .
>
> Of course contents of wiki pages may be totally wrong because the
> contents were written by people knowing the package less than the
> maintainers and authors. But everyone knows this and will take care.
>
> This wiki can server as fail over if the maintainer is on holiday.
>
> This wiki page will prevent people blogging about packages and benchmark
> results anywhere on the internet. So it's much more likely that this
> information is read and maintained.
> If you use google to look for bug fixes or such you may have success.
> But very often you end up reading pages dated 3 years ago which are
> outdated.
>
> This wiki page would be I simple effective way letting users annotate
> packages.
>
> Costs: Make hackage add one link.
> It would look like this: http://mawercer.de/~marc/hackage-link-example.jpg
> This link should point to the existing haskell wiki on haskell.org:
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/project-name-without-version
>
>
> Even if the maintainer is availible 24/h a day he won't upload a new
> minor version to hackage for each change. But maybe he'll paste a small
> note that the darcs repo is more up to date fixing issue x/y.
> You don't want to upload a new version because you added some
> documentation.
> Why don't you want to do that ?
> It's because hackage will keep every version which was uploaded once by
> design. Having 50 versions of one package just causes much more work for
> tools such as cabal install or hack-nix. Figuring out a solution to
> install all packages is hard enough.
>
> Maintainers can create the wiki page and subscribe to change
> notifications. So I don't think it'll be that much work for them to keep
> an eye on those wiki pages.
>
> How do you think about it?
> It's about centralizing information and saving your and my time.
> Many packages aready do have a wiki page. So why not make it easier for
> all to add one?
>
> Thoughts ?
>
> Currently my goal is updating some common packages so that they use
> extensible exceptions and base4.
> But when working on some patches I'd like to tell people that I'm doing
> so. I can't in an easy way. That's why I'm starting this thread.
>
> Marc Weber
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