Wow, thank you for the comprehensive critique! I'll respond to your
points individually.
On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 11:26 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk
I've read your new proposal and I think you'll definitely need more solid specification on what you aim to do. An example is that you state 3 things for the ‘rewrite the homepage’ aim but the goals are ’rewrite/reword something, move an advertisement, add some links’. While these are perfectly fine goals, they do not fit your timescale at all! Just this aim alone you schedule for nearly a month! It sounds that it could be done in a day instead. By the way, I don't think that moving the advertisement is such a high priority that it needs to go into a proposal: if they're funding Hackage and want their ad on the front page, I don't see the problem. Existing Haskellers will rarely look at the front page and new ones will probably see it a few times. I doubt anyone would click on the About without a good reason to.
Agreed. On looking further into the Hackage issues list, I found there's a lot more to be done.
Your specification of the search work is very lacking too. You don't say what's wrong with current search and how you aim to improve it. I believe Duncan Coutts was working on better search results by using better heuristics. I don't know the details but it's almost certainly worthwhile to contact him about it.
Sure. He seems to be the go-to guy for everything Cabal/Hackage, so I agree it's a good idea to talk to him.
Here are two things that I think need attention interface-wise. Note that even with these, you'll probably need to state more stuff:
* Better report presentation: at the moment we (sometimes) can get a report log from Hackage about the build status of a package. At the moment one has to manually change the URL to then get to dumped ‘Show’ instance of a Cabal data type. Buttons should be added and the report should be presented in a much nicer way. Maybe even we could have a small indicator whether the build worked or not on Hackage.
* Hackage exposes an API that lets us work with it. You can see it at [1]. While it's nice to have, there's functionality there that's only available through the API itself when it really should also be available through friendlier means on the site itself. A big thing that comes to my mind is the documentation uploads. If you search around the web, you'll see that uploading own documentation for a package is quite a mysterious process. It'd be much easier if we had a button which will take us to an upload page which also contains instructions for properly generating the documentation. Implementing a documentation checker (for example to check that cross-package links aren't broken, aren't pointing to local things, checks that index page works, all the common mistakes) could be a side project.
I admit -- I didn't even know Hackage had either of these before today, when I saw them on your blog ;). Exposing them would be great.
Lastly, there are ~90 open bugs on the Hackage issue tracker[2]. Many of those are fairly easy and of pretty great benefit to Hackage users (a.k.a. pretty much everyone). Things like #74[3] could be implemented with relative ease and I feel that if you could propose to close some specific tickets and work on others, your proposal would be much, much stronger. Frankly, I think that moving the ad from the front page is much lower priority than many of the tickets there ;) I actually thing that if one were to concentrate on the tickets themselves and make (some of) the interface work a side goal, nearly all the tickets could be fixed. Of course some tickets are best fixed with interface changes so it's not like that's going on the back-burner.
Thanks for the suggestion -- the proposal pretty much writes itself now, with each issue mapping to a task in the proposal.
A friendly reminder that there are only about 32 hours to get your proposal in so make sure you don't miss it!
Bring it on. It's Friday here, so I don't need to sleep ;)
Oh, I nearly forgot, did you find a mentor for this new project you're proposing?
Not yet -- but it's not too late to do that, right? I notice the other Mateusz has asked on cabal-devel; I might follow him when I'm more awake. Chris
[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/api [2]: https://github.com/haskell/hackage-server/issues [3]: https://github.com/haskell/hackage-server/issues/74 -- Mateusz K. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe