[Haskell-cafe] Package documentation complaints -- and a suggestion

[Gregory Collins]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Ryan Newton <rrnewton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good point. On the other hand, nobody points package authors to the
>> Debian documentation (and Debian also has review for newly uploaded
>> packages, as far as I know).
>
> Re: review process -- Perhaps there would be a use for a review process
> somewhere between haskell-platform and the unwashed masses?
> HP covers a very small percentage of packages, but a larger percentage could
> probably pass some kind of review akin to the debian process.  And it would
> be a good forcing function to get people to do the things they don't get
> around to....

I'm skeptical. We seem to have trouble getting enough of people's
spare time to tackle interesting engineer work, let alone relatively
thankless administrative/bureaucratic/procedural work. If people are
going to devote time towards solving this particular problem (poorly
documented libraries), an interesting first step would be to try
solving the problem using technological means, i.e.: prohibit or
otherwise discourage uploads to hackage that fail
automatically-verifiable criteria here.

Examples could include: "Your package lacks a description", "more than
X% of your modules lack toplevel module comments", "fewer than Y% of
your toplevel exports have haddock comments", etc... Packages with
stability=experimental would probably be exempt from the requirements.
Duncan could probably comment authoritatively, but I'm guessing
Hackage 2 might provide a better framework for tackling these kinds of
policy issues, because it would probably allow you to e.g. filter the
package list by stability.

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>