[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com idea: strike forces

[Michael Snoyman]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
<ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29 October 2010 20:19, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>> Anyway, integration with existing services would be very good, but I
>> doubt it will be possible. I don't think there's a way to
>> automatically create a mailing list, trac project, and so on and so
>> forth, and I'm not certain it would make sense to make such a feature
>> possible. I suppose something like this would be a possible goal to
>> look towards if we ever start working more seriously on single-signon
>> and the like, but for now, I think we're stuck reinventing the wheel.
>
> At the very least, there could be a link to a pre-existing mailing
> list and trac instance.

I think the SIG admin will be in charge of adding any links he/she
wishes. Maybe we'll make the discussion/tracker stuff optional.

> For those projects/strikeforces/SIGs that don't have existing bug
> trackers, which would you think of using?  Are you suddenly going to
> write a new one in Haskell? :p

Umm.... apparently. I'm not really planning on anything complex, but
this is the area where I really wanted community feedback. Here's an
example proposal for how it would work:

There's no separate tracker; instead, there is a discussion board
only. Members of the SIG can create new topics and add messages to
existing topics at will. Non-members must have these actions moderated
by an admin. The topics will appear on the SIG page, and there will be
a news feed to get notified of new topics/messages. Messages will be
linear within a topic.

This is just about the simplest proposal I can come up with. We could
add statuses (open, assigned, resolved, irrelevant) to topics, or
other things like that. Is this reimplementing trac in an inferior
way? Yes. Will this make it easier for users to participate in
multiple SIGs and follow lots of different topics simultaneously? I
believe so.

>> Your SIG idea sounds possible, let's play it out. I'll go with web
>> development, since I'm personally involved there. I suppose the idea
>> would be I could create such an interest group, and hopefully
>> developers on other frameworks (Happstack and Snap for instance) could
>> join the team. Users may come and start requesting features, and
>> everyone interested in solving the problem could participate in the
>> discussion. Seems like it would fit right in with the strike force
>> proposal, just under a different name. I have no objection to trying
>> to name this something more generic such as SIG.
>
> Yeah, to me "strike force" sounds like a more temporary thing designed
> to get something done, and then dissolve once that library is written.

Sounds good. Which makes me think we should have a "SIG status" field,
letting admins specify that their SIGs have been dissolved.

Michael