[Haskell-cafe] hackagebot future ?

[Chris Wong]

Hi Simon,

I maintain an analogous bot for the Rust community, [1] which also
happens to be written in Haskell (for frivolous reasons). I thought it
would be useful to share my experience.

> ... As our community grows, upload activity increases, and more megaprojects with many uploads appear, I've seen more complaints about the noise, and noticed channel ops muting it temporarily. ...

To avoid drowning out discussion, we moved all the bots to their own
#rust-bots channel. This solution has worked well for us so far, and
lets my bot run with a looser rate limit (20 uploads per minute). We
announce compiler+stdlib changes and CI results on there as well.

> Since then I've heard nothing. So, even though I personally like seeing the uploads, and the conversations and connections that sometimes result, I'm inclined to let hackagebot rest indefinitely. Or, would a new maintainer like to take it on ? If you have feelings about it one way or the other, please reply on-list.

I guess another solution could be to batch up these announcements, and
if there are too many of them, send them in a condensed form.
Something like this:

    [hackagebot] New: twilight-0.1, pinkie-0.0. Updated:
applejack-0.3.7, rarity-1.0.1.1, fluttershy-4.3.2.
    [hackagebot] Read more at https://hackage.haskell.org/packages/recent

This may be better than the "separate channel" solution if we want to
encourage conversation about these new packages.

I would be happy to take on maintaining hackagebot. Since I'm already
running one package announcer, adding a second shouldn't be too much
of a burden 😉. It'd be interesting to see if the two code bases can
be merged, and if we could rewrite the bot to use irc-core [2] instead
of a home-grown thing.

Chris

[1] https://github.com/lfairy/hircine/tree/master/brigitte
[2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/irc-core

-- 
Chris Wong (https://lambda.xyz)

"I had not the vaguest idea what this meant and when I could not
remember the words, my tutor threw the book at my head, which did not
stimulate my intellect in any way." -- Bertrand Russell