[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining lambdabot

[James Cook]

On Feb 19, 2013, at 9:54 PM, Jason Dagit <dagitj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Random thought, feel free to ignore it: Would it make sense to split lambdabot up into core and contrib like is done with xmonad? Contrib could contain the sillier things like bf, unlambda, show, etc and would have a lower bar for contributors. Core would be the standard things and the essential things.

Sounds like a good idea to me.  I could probably do that this weekend if nobody else does sooner.  Any opinion about whether it's better to put them in the same or separate actual repos?  I've tried both with different collections of related packages and have no strong opinion, myself.

> It seems that people don't really contribute new plugins these days but it would be great if they did. For example, having a plugin for liquid types would be super spiffy. Also, any plugin that helps people to reason about other code (like vacuum).

I suspect there are two big reasons for that.  The biggest reason is probably that lambdabot has been getting long in the tooth, and the barrier to entry is sorting through a somewhat bit- rotted API with little to no documentation.  That's why a lot of the work I did to clean it up for myself was API-related.

The other is that there seemed to be, for a long time, no interest in maintaining it.  Several years ago I did some work on fixing up some plugins, for example, but couldn't get a response from whoever was the current maintainer (I think it might have been dons, who was probably overextended at the time).

Hopefully the API can be further simplified and documented; if it can be reduced to a few well-documented "core" modules and a few auxiliary utility/helper ones, that would probably make the educational barrier to entry quite a bit lower, and I'm happy to maintain the repo or willing to let others do so, so hopefully we can reduce the social barrier too.  I don't currently have a lot of time to devote to hacking on it, but I try to be a responsive maintainer of all my projects.

-- James