Subject: Re: Making Haskell more open
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general
Date: 2005-11-12 09:04:08 GMT (3 years, 33 weeks, 4 days, 17 hours and 48 minutes ago)
Simon Peyton-Jones (simonpj <at> microsoft.com) wrote: Dear Simon, > Dear Haskell folk > > One thing that hit me forcibly during ICFP in Tallinn, and the > associated workshops, is that the Haskell community may not be as good > as (say) the Perl community at engaging and involving the people "in > the trenches" [PRL]. Haskell.org is centrally maintained by a couple of > (excellent) people; GHC is still over-dependent on Simon and me; we > don't yet have a good central site for offering libraries; and so on. it is very encouraging to see that despite working on a capital Haskell project, you are thinking about the global community as well. > However, I still wonder if there are things we could do that would make > it easier for people to contribute. Here are two concrete suggestions: [snip] > Many of you will know much more about this kind of thing than I > do. Share your wisdom with the mailing list. In the light of your suggestions, proposals, I'll (despite being a Haskell noob) share my ideas¹, which are based on one assumption - haskell.org can be used as a bed for the whole thing... ¹ I'll use letter chars to denote that points are not listed according to priorities a) convert the whole haskell.org site into a community portal by using some CMS (eg. Drupal - http://drupal.org/ - which is used on LTU & Haskell Sequence sites). By giving accounts to trusted users, creating of content can be made much easier and we'll get a more material published in less time. I'd like that we keep the present css style of the site (color theme) which I find very nice and appealing, but use the Drupal's feature to make some categories from the present homepage's links like: i) A Short Introduction to Haskell can be made like About menu bar ii) Definition of Haskell - another category in the main menu bar iii) Books and Tutorials² - another category iv) Libraries and Tools² iv) Links to Haskell-related blogs & sites .. ... xx) Forums³ ² those type of categories I'd made like e.g. http://gnomefiles.org/ & http://www.kde-apps.org/ sites where the books/tutorials/aplications can be catalogized according to the software type, reviewed & rated by users, and relevant links with homepage, screenshots, version histories etc. can be provided. ³ I'll mention and (try to) justify them a little bit later The rest of the haskell.org portal site can be used for displaying latest forum topics, important news, quick links etc. b) make a haskell.org repository for haskell-related projects by adding some required features so that Haskell projects can move from e.g. SF to haskell.org. Here I'm thinking about Trac - wiki and issue tracking system (http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/). It is simple & powerful enough. It combines wiki (the present hawiki entries can be imported (http://projects.edgewall.com/trac/ticket/2068) with the ticket system handy for handling bug requests, feature requests, setting roadmaps, timelines etc. and great thing that there is a darcs backend available so every proejct can have darcs repository avaialable. (this is why I prefer trac over e.g. bugzilla, RT...) Several projects (ghc, gtk2hs) are already hosted on haskell.org, but with the Trac it is very easy to provide SF-like features on haskell.org with not so complicated setup & maintainance. So projects (e.g. gtk2hs) can have their own style & features (gallery, blog...), while other projects can use just a Trac and have a working site with the darcs repo in practically no time (see e.g. opensync.org site). c) providing unified front-end for mail-archives & search By implementing point b) several projects can move their mailing lists & mail-archives to haskell.org and we can setup front-end for searching/browsing all the haskell-related lists like (see e.g. http://mail.gnome.org/archives/) d) enhance the present wiki system The present hawiki is very rich and provides lot of information for haskell searchers, but it is, imho, too flat in the sense that it could be enhanced by providing better Table Of Contents and having shorter pages to find material more quickly. Some of the wiki entries could find their place (link) on the portal's homepage, in the Docs section etc. e) forums Several posts were regarding forums/newsgroups/mailing lists/irc and I consider that forums can be very handy feature for the new Haskell community portal siteLet us consider the pro/cons of the present communication means: i) mailing lists pro) - very convenient interface - searchable archives cons) - it is not easy to jump in the discussion after some time - it requires subscription ii) #irc pro) - very interactive - quick solutions for many problems cons) - it can be very time-consuming (discussion can go astray or nothing is happening at all) - the same questions/answers are regularly asked/answered iii) forum pro) - provides ability to have sticky posts for FAQ, howtos, etc. - searchable archives - one can always jump in the thread by replying to appropriate post (even much later than original post is posted) - ability to have email notification when some replies are posted The potential of newsgroup was also mentioned - creating of compl.lang.haskell, but I won't comment of it considering that the newsgroup cannot be one & all solution, and, otoh, does not, imho, provide any substantial advantage over the other three forms (we already have lists & irc, and forums come 'for free' with CMS). f) enhancing & opening GHC manual Besides my vote for simple authoring tool for working on GHC manual, Drupal offers so called 'Collaborative Book' (http://drupal.org/node/284) feature which can even export to DocBook XML in case we want to preserve its format. Conclusion: The above listed proposals can help to put Haskell comunity even more together by providing central place for sharing ideas, news, software...and by using ticket system and having concrete timelines, roadmaps, tasks...it will become much easier to engage people with different skills contribute to the whole community in many ways: i) writing simple patches for certain project ii) becoming developer ... ii) providing translation iii) testing iv) writing documentation (manuals, tutorials...) v) web design vi) administration & maintenance (forums, lists...) vii) writing news articles... The result of the above points would be that we can provide the strategy for the further develpment of the whole community by: i) organizing bug-days and/or bug-week to squash bugs (ghc example) ii) providing more man-power for the apps which are important for promoting Haskell as general programming language further iii) ... Shortly, by having concrete strategy how to enhance/improve the whole community (language, applications, libs, documentation) we can hope to attract much more man-power (non-PhD users