Idea to allow people to comment on Haskell docs

[Isaac Jones]

Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> On Wed, 2006-01-18 at 09:01 +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
>> It looks great!  But I'd never have found the link if you hadn't pointed
>> me at it.
>> 
>> Rather than "Wiki" say "User comments".  
>
> Done.
>
>> And I think the per-entry [User comment] link is essential.  Typically
>> people are going to be looking at a particular thing.  For example, here
>> 	
>> http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/docs/devel/Graphics-Rendering-Cairo-SVG.html#v:svgRenderFromString
>> is where I'd look for the link for svgRenderFromString.
>
> Done!

I think this is quite cool, but there's one thing that concerns me.

I fear that users will have the sense that these links are being
monitored by the module authors and that if they make a comment like,
"there's an error here" or "here's an enhancement" that someone is
actually going to see it and modify the haddock.  In reality, there's
no real way to know whether anyone will ever read a comment.  There
will be far too many pages for anyone to monitor (unless someone is
going to watch an RSS feed or something).

This might actually deter people from modifying the haddock code
directly and submitting patches, since they did their part by
commenting on the function.

I'd encourage you to consider how it might interact with the new trac
ticket system also.  Maybe there should be a "spot a bug" or "make a
suggestion" link that creates a trac bug.


peace,

  isaac