On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Marc Weber
hackage is success because: a) many (most) people do use it (by uploading packages) b) it is a comprehensive list of availible packages if not the most comprehensive one
Duncan, can you write about your concerns briefly why some maintainers may dislike this idea ?
Hackage is missing one feature: It is very static. I mean if you have a patch or a question or a comment you have to lookup the darcs repository, write the patch then contact the author and wait.. If the author replies everything is fine. If he doesn't you don't know what to do. And if he does your commitment still doesn't show up on hackage.
Using a wiki page for each project enables anybody to add comments. I'm thinking about this kind of comments:
"Interlude doesn't work for me. It looks like the interlude.h file passes a tuple to the reportError function which doesn't expect a tuple. You can fix it by removing the "," in the .h file. Try this patch: http://github.com/MarcWeber/haskell-nix-overlay/blob/master/patches/interlud... "
Of course I mailed the author. Looking at the package again I noticed that it was uploaded by someone else: GwernBranwen. gwern on #haskell told me that the author is responsive so I'll just wait some days, but others will try and fail as well. If the other person is new to haskell he may not find the fix fast. He just wants to know which of the heads is causing trouble..
Another use case would be users adding "If you're interested in this topic also have a look at XXX"
Yet another use case is someone figuring out that function X was removed in version Y. He could than add a note
x vanished since v.10 and everybody who wants to update cabal dependency constraints doesn't have to download the darcs repo to figure out that he should use package <= v.10 .
Of course contents of wiki pages may be totally wrong because the contents were written by people knowing the package less than the maintainers and authors. But everyone knows this and will take care.
This wiki can server as fail over if the maintainer is on holiday.
This wiki page will prevent people blogging about packages and benchmark results anywhere on the internet. So it's much more likely that this information is read and maintained. If you use google to look for bug fixes or such you may have success. But very often you end up reading pages dated 3 years ago which are outdated.
This wiki page would be I simple effective way letting users annotate packages.
Costs: Make hackage add one link. It would look like this: http://mawercer.de/~marc/hackage-link-example.jpg This link should point to the existing haskell wiki on haskell.org: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/project-name-without-version
Would the link check for the article actually existing? Not much good to point people to a wiki page that doesn't exist, unless they know and intend to contribute something. Also, even if the article existed, how many people will feel like clicking on it to see what may be there? I'd suggest the code would check for an existing page, be colored red (or omitted?) if it doesn't, and if it does exist, then add a hyperlinks - and also load the page in a small frame. (I have some custom JavaScript on Wikipedia that loads in a frame talk pages beneath/at the bottom of an article; I can attest from personal experience that the quick glance-ability this adds is very valuable and makes me much more likely to see what a talk page has to add, takes up minimal screen real estate, and since it loads after everything else does, has a minimal performance penalty.) -- gwern