Re: [Haskell-cafe] Package descriptions on hackage

There are several problems here: 1) Not everyone can write beautiful clear English descriptions, it takes a certain skill. 2) The person writing the description is the author, who knows all the details, but the person reading the description doesn't - writing for a different audience is an even harder skill to master. 3) It's easy to miss something when updating a package. 4) Quality documentation places an ongoing maintenance burden on the package, and while test suites etc. make code maintenance easy, I don't know any way to automatically check documentation! Why not email the maintainers of packages you think need a better description - ideally giving suggestions? I'd welcome that for any of my packages. Thanks, Neil On Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

On 5 September 2011 23:59, Joachim Breitner wrote:

...

Dear hackage package authors,

this is a short message from your distribution package creators: Please, if possible, write good, not too short descriptions, and also keep them up to date. Of course, users browsing hackage will benefit as well.

Also for potential users trying to work out what your library does!

Something that I find particularly frustrating is all the libraries of the form "hFoo: Haskell bindings to the Foo library"; well, what _is_ the Foo library?

-- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

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