Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com idea: strike forces

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On 29 October 2010 20:19, Michael Snoyman wrote:

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Anyway, integration with existing services would be very good, but I doubt it will be possible. I don't think there's a way to automatically create a mailing list, trac project, and so on and so forth, and I'm not certain it would make sense to make such a feature possible. I suppose something like this would be a possible goal to look towards if we ever start working more seriously on single-signon and the like, but for now, I think we're stuck reinventing the wheel.

At the very least, there could be a link to a pre-existing mailing list and trac instance.

I think the SIG admin will be in charge of adding any links he/she wishes. Maybe we'll make the discussion/tracker stuff optional.

For those projects/strikeforces/SIGs that don't have existing bug trackers, which would you think of using?  Are you suddenly going to write a new one in Haskell? :p

Umm.... apparently. I'm not really planning on anything complex, but this is the area where I really wanted community feedback. Here's an example proposal for how it would work: There's no separate tracker; instead, there is a discussion board only. Members of the SIG can create new topics and add messages to existing topics at will. Non-members must have these actions moderated by an admin. The topics will appear on the SIG page, and there will be a news feed to get notified of new topics/messages. Messages will be linear within a topic. This is just about the simplest proposal I can come up with. We could add statuses (open, assigned, resolved, irrelevant) to topics, or other things like that. Is this reimplementing trac in an inferior way? Yes. Will this make it easier for users to participate in multiple SIGs and follow lots of different topics simultaneously? I believe so.

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Your SIG idea sounds possible, let's play it out. I'll go with web development, since I'm personally involved there. I suppose the idea would be I could create such an interest group, and hopefully developers on other frameworks (Happstack and Snap for instance) could join the team. Users may come and start requesting features, and everyone interested in solving the problem could participate in the discussion. Seems like it would fit right in with the strike force proposal, just under a different name. I have no objection to trying to name this something more generic such as SIG.

Yeah, to me "strike force" sounds like a more temporary thing designed to get something done, and then dissolve once that library is written.

Sounds good. Which makes me think we should have a "SIG status" field, letting admins specify that their SIGs have been dissolved. Michael