[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell web development entries on the Wiki

[Michael Snoyman]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 2:16 PM, Henning Thielemann
<lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 6 Oct 2010, Christopher Done wrote:
>
>> On 6 October 2010 12:47, Henning Thielemann
>> <thunderbird at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
>>>
>>> I for instance use http-shed and mohws all the time. They do what they
>>> shall
>>> do for me. I maintain mohws
>>
>> Please move the ones you use and maintain to the active list!
>
>  I'm generally not glad that some people rearrange existing structure and
> expect that all of the affected authors follow. It's already tedious to
> catch up with the yearly changes in GHC's package and other base packages
> (e.g. transformers recently), and annoying when people propose to mark
> packages as "inactive" or "unmaintained" in Hackage whenever the package
> authors did not update their packages so far (and certainly lose
> compatibility to older 'base' versions this way).
>  I would be glad if there is no further action to be taken for package
> authors, who added their packages somewhen in the past and don't see a
> reason to regularly check whether their packages are still listed in the
> Wiki, without being marked "inactive" or so. If you think the re-structuring
> is necessary, then at least ask the maintainers, whether they still maintain
> their packages, or just sort the packages according to the degree of
> activity you assume, but stay away from categorizing the packages in
> "active" and "inactive" based on speculation.

I agree that it can be tedious to keep up with these changes, but the
alternative is stagnation. Just a few years ago, I was in the place of
the newbie staring at the wiki pages talking about all the wonderful
ways of combining the CGI monad with fastcgi and xhtml and
combinators, and something about monad transformer stacks (which I'd
never even heard of). If I remember correctly, I gave up on Haskell
for a month or so after the intimidation that kind of page introduces.

Chris has done an amazing job here of cleaning up content and making
it approachable by new users. I think that should be the main purpose
of the wiki. If you want to have some documentation that no one else
can edit, you can put it on your own site. That's what I've done for
Yesod, and appears to be the approach of most of the other actively
developed projects out there.

It's true that in such a large reworking as Chris has undertaken there
will be some accidental miscategorizations, but the alternate you
mention (contacting each author before moving an article) is simply
untenable: it's difficult to track people down sometimes, it takes a
long time to get a response, etc. I'd much rather have a very clean
looking wiki page that's missing a few packages than the jumble of
confusion we had before hand.

Michael