Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

[wren ng thornton]

On 11/9/10 7:02 AM, Gregory Collins wrote:
> Maybe we should assemble a posse of volunteers, divide up the libraries, and
> spend a few hours each adding this kind of documentary material to try to make
> a real impact on the average quality level in the platform.

Perhaps we could make use of the haskellers.com SIG model to set this up 
and popularize it.

> The cynic in me,
> however, suspects that the willingness to do this kind of grunt work is greatly
> overshadowed by the appetite to engage in endless rounds of mailing list
> bickering.

Methinks going with a SIG (with an associated hackathon) would help 
overcome the intertia. Because, really, that's what it is. With large 
community projects I've found that whatever the level of documentation 
and testing is, people tend to roll along with it (with some energy lost 
to friction :)  Which means that things only really become a problem 
when there gets to be little/no documentation. Bodies at rest; bodies in 
motion. Certainly I've felt that packages like containers are 
effectively static rather than under _active_ maintenance and open to 
user contributions (the recent optimizations being the exception to 
prove the rule).

-- 
Live well,
~wren