[HOpenGL] Hello HOpenGL

[Jason Dagit]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Balazs Komuves <bkomuves at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> First of all, let me be clear in that I don't think the maintenance politics
> is the most important thing here; however I'm all for more transparency,
> and more public feedback before sudden ad-hoc changes (especially
> when they go against my subjective tastes).

We can talk about those issues separately then.

>
> I think the not very transparent part was declaring yourself the maintainer
> without having any public feedback.

Someone needs to be the active maintainer.  I asked advice from a few
people in the open source community and their advice was to just take
over.  I'm sorry that part was not more democratic.  Would you like to
be the maintainer?  I mean that sincerely.  I don't need to be the
maintainer, but I do want to see the library continue and improve.  I
plan to hand the reigns over in the future and I believe you know
opengl and the haskell opengl well enough to fill that role.

> Also, the summer of code project
> application was completely opaque, I've yet to see even the proposal,
> and I'm here, on the libraries list, on reddit, I read the cafe archives,
> tried to google it, and even asked for it explicitly on reddit.

I've asked Alexander to share his proposal many times.  I'm not sure
why that hasn't happened yet.

For what it's worth, the proposal was reviewed by the Haskell.org GSoC
mentors.  Conal Elliot helped Alexander put it together.  I agree
that's is not fair that you haven't seen it.  Let's work on fixing
that.  Alexander, could you please post your proposal (minus the
timeline) on this list?

>
> Anyway, we should probably focus our energies on more meaningful stuff.

Agreed, although I would like to right the wrongs which can still be
righted.  I know you've published quite a few useful libraries on
Hackage for opengl related work and I want/need your support.  We
might disagree about some details but I am trying to listen with an
open mind :)

>> Maybe we can get your frame buffer objects in to the newer bindings?
>
> Yes, of course I'm happy to help with it. However the patch was written
> back before the OpenGL / OpenGLRaw split, so it's probably needs
> some extra work to make it work with the current bindings, and I'm not
> familiar with the new code base.
>
> The patches are in this darcs patch file, the ones with "FBO" in the
> description:
> http://code.haskell.org/~bkomuves/hopengl_2009-03-13.patch
>
>
>>  * Putting the repos on github
>>  * Updating the Haskell wiki to point to github
>>  * Creating a haskell-opengl organization on github to organize the
>> development efforts
>
> I'm not familiar with either git or github. Was the switch from darcs was
> really justified at this point? I know that many people consider git/github
> the best thing since sliced bread, but I fail to get the hype at the moment.

I helped out with darcs development for a few years, so I know it well
and I know the Haskell community historically supported it.  I also
know that this summer it will be gaining a darcs to git bridge, making
it easier to be a darcs user while interacting with a git world.  My
decision to go with git here is more social than technical.

> Furthermore, the haskell community server should have infrastructure
> like bug-tracker etc already in place (or at least that was the case
> before the server migration saga).

I don't think haskell.org has a good track record for running project
hosting, and I even think h.o should get out of the project hosting
business.

Git has a terrible ui, but github makes up for it in providing solid
hosting and by enhancing collaboration (code review is easy,
visibility into what people are doing is easy, forking and playing
around is easy, viewing diffs is easy, convenient dashboard view,
etc).  As a long time darcs user, the switch to github has not been
easy for me but it has been worth it.  I wanted darcs to succeed for a
long time, but these days I see instead the value provided by the high
quality hosting github provides and especially the collaboration
features they provide.

Thanks,
Jason