Infrastructure & Communication

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Hello Fellow Committee Members!


Following up on the official announcement, here's a few basic things we
should get agreement over before proceeding.  First off, I'm hoping we
can manage to avoid confusing email-threading in the interest of finding
information easier lateron in the email archives. To this end, I'd like
to ask you to consider changing the subject of your reply if you realise
that the topic discussed is diverging significantly from the one
advertised in the Subject-header. 

I'll start with the following basic topic

## Infrastructure & Communication

Obviously, we have *this* public (archived) mailing list
"haskell-prime at haskell.org". There's also a (registered) IRC channel
"#haskell-prime" on freenode where many of us will probably hang around.


In the past, the Prime committee used Trac (currently
at https://prime.haskell.org/ ) to organise its work.
Trac provides a wiki, source-browser, and a ticket tracker (which is
familiar to GHC developers, and e.g. allows easy migration of
wiki-content to/from the GHC Wiki).

Some time ago, I converted the original Haskell-Report Darcs
repositories into a single Git repository (with branches) at GitHub

 - https://github.com/haskell/haskell-report

This repo is setup to be mirrored to

 - https://git.haskell.org/haskell-report.git

which in turn is also accessible from within Trac at

 - https://prime.haskell.org/browser


However, since Trac has accumulated quite a bit of old content in its
ticket-tracker over the years, and "Haskell 2020" has been coined a
reboot. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to start over at GitHub,
and consider the Trac instance mostly as a legacy archive of historic
content.


GitHub allows for Git-based workflows, and there's prior art related to
language design we could steal ideas from, for instance:

 - https://github.com/fsharp/FSharpLangDesign
 - https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs
 - https://github.com/golang/proposal
 - (any others noteworthy?)

IMO, GitHub's issue tracker has become flexible enough for our needs and
its integration with Git pull-requests allows to e.g. group together
change proposal description/motivation, discussion, and finaly the delta
to the haskell-report (with inline annotations/reviews) and so on.
(However, I consider GitHub's Wiki-component quite weak. I'm not sure
what to do about that. Maybe keep using Trac's wiki for that?)


Moreover, we can have CI (I've actually set up a TravisCI job which
builds the LaTeX code) for the Haskell Language report drafts.

One benefit I see from using GitHub is that this way would we be closer
to the Haskell community (given the majority of Hackage packages are
hosted on GitHub), and our work would be more transparent for the
community as well as offering a lower barrier to
participation/contribution.

Moreover, I think GitHub would also help make our efforts/progress
towards a revised Haskell Report more visible to the community, which in
turn may even provide us the motivation to carry on...

So...

Does anyone object to using GitHub?

In case there's no objection, which of the existing language-design
GitHub projects do you consider a good fit for Haskell Prime and
therefore worthy of imitation?

Any other comments/suggestions?



Cheers,
  HVR
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