Re: [Haskell-cafe] Package documentation complaints -- and a suggestion

On 25 October 2011 18:54, Gregory Collins wrote:

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:34 AM, wren ng thornton wrote:

...

I'm not so sure about that exemption. The "experimental" stability level seems to be the norm on Hackage and often means "I use this for real projects, but because I use it for real projects I'm not quite willing to hammer the API in stone just yet".

...

Before dealing with automatic documentation requirements, perhaps it'd be better to develop a standard consensus on the terms used in the stability field and actively advocating for people to adopt it, as was done with the PVP.

I think there's no need to cajole people into it -- if Hackage 2 puts "stable" packages on a different / better list, there's your social pressure. Right now the stability flag in the .cabal file, as you pointed out, is almost completely content-free.

Right, but first we need to define what all those terms _mean_... and it's no good saying your package is "stable" if you change the API in a large-scale fashion every release. Also, by promoting packages that are self-picked as stable, this could stop people from picking a better package just because the maintainer is honest enough to state that they're still working on it... I mean, if base and containers keep changing, what can we _really_ say is a stable package? -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com