Interesting and thoughtful, thanks. I think we need to file these ideas in the hackage trac. They've been floating about for a while but we need to get them properly recorded. On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 01:06 -0500, wren ng thornton wrote:
Minimally these aggregated reports should indicate the package and version, the problem, the Haskell compiler and its version, as well as the OS. Since some packages have many dependencies or make heavy use of the FFI, CPP, or have architecture dependent differences, it would be nice to be able to set per-package preferences to get additional information like OS version, dependency versions, CPU info, build logs, etc.
The information we would collect for anonymous reports would be just: package: HTTP-4000.0.2 os: linux arch: x86_64 compiler: ghc-6.10.1 client: cabal-install-0.6.1 flags: -old-base dependencies: array-0.2.0.0 base-3.0.3.0 bytestring-0.9.1.5 mtl-1.1.0.2 network-2.2.0.1 parsec-2.1.0.1 install-outcome: InstallOk docs-outcome: NotTried tests-outcome: NotTried This is all machine readable of course so we can aggregate information from 1000s of reports.
Since it can be hard to set up sandboxes for every configuration, it'd also be nice if clients could opt in to send contact email as well, if they're willing to back-and-forth with the developer to fix things in the event of bugs.
Non-anonymous reports with build logs will have to be associated with registered accounts. I expect that would provide a way to get in touch with some testers. Some of the testers of course will just be automated build clients.
Second, and this would take more work, I would like it if the Haddock documentation for packages could be given a wiki-like and/or reddit-like interface so that people could make comments about what is unclear or needs better documentation as well as offering spelling/grammar/punctuation suggestions[2]. Viewers should be able to set preferences for whether they want to see the real/current documentation, or whether they want to see the commented/modified version (hiding things below a certain depth or rank for reddit-like).
We had a thread on this the other day with similar ideas. Duncan