On 15/10/14 09:37, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:

I think that would be a fine idea, but it's always hard - pages change their status (a proposal becomes part of GHC) - a page may "belong" in multiple places - people keep URLs in bookmarks, and they are linked from other pages in Trac so moving pages is painful.

The last is significant. Do we leave "this page has moved" stub pages (i.e. still cluttering the TitleIndex). Or do we move them, and live with dead links. I'm very un-keen on dead links in Trac itself. Maybe there is some way to rewrite all of those, at least?

You can leave indirections in place in Trac, like this: [[redirect(wiki:Building/Preparation/Windows)]] I've done this a few times when I moved pages to better organise things. I agree that it does leave some clutter in TitleIndex, that's unfortunate, but I think it's worth it to have good organisation. Cheers, Simon

I don't have a strong opinion here

Simon

| -----Original Message----- | From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of | Yuras Shumovich | Sent: 14 October 2014 23:13 | To: ghc-devs@haskell.org Devs | Subject: Wiki: special namespace for proposals? | | | Hello, | | Would it be better to organize proposals under one namespace? Right | now they belongs to root namespace, so title index ( | https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TitleIndex ) is hard to use. | | I was going to start new page describing language extension, but I | don't want do increase entropy even more. What about creating special | namespace, e.g. "Proposals"? Probably makes sense to divide if | farther? | | Thanks, | Yuras | | _______________________________________________ | ghc-devs mailing list | ghc-devs@haskell.org | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

Suggestion: Why not use the namespace 'Design' rather than 'Proposal'? Rationale: a Proposal is a proposed design, and a final implementation is, well, an implementation of that design. So what the thing "is" does not change, but its status (proposal vs implemented) does. And, in fact, there can even be a third status: obsolete. In other words "that used to be the design". Those should be documented too! What is needed is a clear signpost, right at the top, which differentiates what status a Design is in. Jacques On 2014-10-15 5:06 AM, Jan Stolarek wrote:

I'm all for improving organization of the wiki but I'm not sure about this idea. What happens when a proposal gets implemented? You can't just move the page to a new address. You can create a new wiki page describing the final dsign that was implemented and replace the content of the proposal page with a redirection. But that menas more mess in the wiki namespace.

Janek

Dnia środa, 15 października 2014, Yuras Shumovich napisał:

...

Hello,

Would it be better to organize proposals under one namespace? Right now they belongs to root namespace, so title index ( https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/TitleIndex ) is hard to use.

I was going to start new page describing language extension, but I don't want do increase entropy even more. What about creating special namespace, e.g. "Proposals"? Probably makes sense to divide if farther?

Thanks, Yuras

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Instead of encoding the status in the URL, since we don't want URLs to change with the status of the proposal/feature changes, it sounds like we really just want something better than TitleIndex for browsing the wiki. (I've never seen a Trac wiki where TitleIndex is that useful anyway, other than to ctrl-f stuff.) I'm not really familiar with what Trac Wiki is capable of. Is it possible to add tags/categories to a page and then make an auto-generated list of links to all pages with a given tag/category? Then local edits to a given design (changing the category from 'proposed' to 'implemented') would automatically move it around as appropriate. I think it would be helpful to have a single place from which we could browse current/past proposals. If for no other reason than to get an idea how to write one myself. On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

Am Mittwoch, den 15.10.2014, 11:06 +0200 schrieb Jan Stolarek:

...

I'm all for improving organization of the wiki but I'm not sure about this idea. What happens when a proposal gets implemented? You can't just move the page to a new address. You can create a new wiki page describing the final dsign that was implemented and replace the content of the proposal page with a redirection. But that menas more mess in the wiki namespace.

I think proposal and design pages are (or at least, could be) different things. In a Proposal, there are alternatives, there are little details, there are notes about dead end, possibly benchmarks or such justifying a choice.

Once something is implemented, most of that is not immediately interesting to someone trying to understand the final design (i.e. to fix a bug). So a good design page would have a structure anyway. And we already have a namespace for that: Commentary!

So when a Proposal gets implemented, this should be clearly noted at the top of the Proposal page, linking to the relevant Comentary page (or paper, if there is one, or Note in the code, if the final design is so simple that it fits that format). The discussion about the Proposal would still be there for those who need to do some historical digging, i.e. when someone suggest a new implementation and we need to check if that variant was considered in the original implementation.

Greetings, Joachm

-- Joachim Breitner e-Mail: mail@joachim-breitner.de Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de Jabber-ID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de

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Joachim >> yes, you are right that proposals and designs are different things.

And we already have a namespace for that: Commentary! Good point.

So when a Proposal gets implemented, this should be clearly noted at the top of the Proposal page, linking to the relevant Comentary page (...) The discussion about the Proposal would still be there for those who need to do some historical digging I disagree about these statements. Wiki pages typically don't contain discussions between people - trac tickets do. Unless you meant theoretical discussion of possible approaches to implementing a proposal. In that case, from my experience, once a proposal is implemented most of the discussion about alternatives becomes irrelevant. Of course a good commentary page will contain justification for the design choices that were made so that exploring dead ends can be avoided in the future.

Andrew makes some good points. We don't want to move pages around - we just want to tag their status. That would be a Good Thing to have. Janek

yeah, agreed currently on the wiki its sometimes hard to determine which pages are "this is how we implemented it" vs "this is a bunch of different ideas and approaches we're trying to layout" On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Joachim Breitner

wrote:

Hi,

...

Joachim >> yes, you are right that proposals and designs are different

Am Mittwoch, den 15.10.2014, 18:48 +0200 schrieb Jan Stolarek: things.

...

...

And we already have a namespace for that: Commentary! Good point.

...

So when a Proposal gets implemented, this should be clearly noted at

the

...

...

top of the Proposal page, linking to the relevant Comentary page (...) The discussion about the Proposal would still be there for those who need to do some historical digging I disagree about these statements. Wiki pages typically don't contain discussions between people - trac tickets do. Unless you meant theoretical discussion of possible approaches to implementing a proposal.

That’s what I meant. The kind of „discussion“ found in papers, not the one found on this list :-)

...

In that case, from my experience, once a proposal is implemented most of the discussion about alternatives becomes irrelevant.

I wouldn’t be too sure about this (but I also don’t have examples to back that up right now).

Another difference: A proposal needs to convince that something is useful and worth doing. Once we have a design page that’s no longer needed, as we have to live with it (or replace it) :-)

Greetings, Joachim

-- Joachim “nomeata” Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/ Jabber: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F Debian Developer: nomeata@debian.org

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