[Haskell-cafe] real haskell difficulties (at least for me)

[Duncan Coutts]

Interesting and thoughtful, thanks.

I think we need to file these ideas in the hackage trac. They've been
floating about for a while but we need to get them properly recorded.

On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 01:06 -0500, wren ng thornton wrote:

> Minimally these aggregated reports should indicate the package and 
> version, the problem, the Haskell compiler and its version, as well as 
> the OS. Since some packages have many dependencies or make heavy use of 
> the FFI, CPP, or have architecture dependent differences, it would be 
> nice to be able to set per-package preferences to get additional 
> information like OS version, dependency versions, CPU info, build logs, 
> etc.

The information we would collect for anonymous reports would be just:

package: HTTP-4000.0.2
os: linux
arch: x86_64
compiler: ghc-6.10.1
client: cabal-install-0.6.1
flags: -old-base
dependencies: array-0.2.0.0 base-3.0.3.0 bytestring-0.9.1.5
              mtl-1.1.0.2 network-2.2.0.1 parsec-2.1.0.1
install-outcome: InstallOk
docs-outcome: NotTried
tests-outcome: NotTried

This is all machine readable of course so we can aggregate information
from 1000s of reports.

> Since it can be hard to set up sandboxes for every configuration, 
> it'd also be nice if clients could opt in to send contact email as well, 
> if they're willing to back-and-forth with the developer to fix things in 
> the event of bugs.

Non-anonymous reports with build logs will have to be associated with
registered accounts. I expect that would provide a way to get in touch
with some testers. Some of the testers of course will just be automated
build clients.

> Second, and this would take more work, I would like it if the Haddock 
> documentation for packages could be given a wiki-like and/or reddit-like 
> interface so that people could make comments about what is unclear or 
> needs better documentation as well as offering 
> spelling/grammar/punctuation suggestions[2]. Viewers should be able to 
> set preferences for whether they want to see the real/current 
> documentation, or whether they want to see the commented/modified 
> version (hiding things below a certain depth or rank for reddit-like).

We had a thread on this the other day with similar ideas.


Duncan