[Haskell-cafe] Design for 2010.2.x series Haskell Platform site

[Andrew Coppin]

Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> The changelog feature would be very useful---dumping repository
> history is no substitute for it because it is too low level (contains
> too much noise).  Generally, I would expect that whoever makes the
> release of a piece of software should be in charge of writing a
> summary of what's new since the last release.  In the case of the
> Haskell platform I would expect just a highlight of major new things
> (e.g., adding/removing new packages, or updates that solve some well
> known problem, or add an interesting new feature).
>
> It would be nice to standardize on the format of a CHANGES file: then
> hackage could render it nicely, and the HP could automatically compute
> a mashup of the CHANGES files for the packages that it distributes.
>   

Yep, I agree with everything you just said.

As somebody who occasionally releases (admittedly useless) packages on 
Hackage, it's really quite irritating that there isn't an easy way to 
say what changed.

(As for scanning a repo to find changes, that's very low-level, you'd 
need a backend for every possible version control system, and for those 
people who don't even use source control, it's not going to work at all. 
Not to mention people who use source control, but don't have anywhere to 
put a repo online...)