Re: [Haskell-cafe] Proposal: remove "Stability" from haddock documentation on hackage

On Jun 7, 2011, at 10:17 AM, Christopher Done wrote:

On 7 June 2011 15:05, James Cook wrote: It's good, in my opinion, to be able to state succinctly in a standardized way that, although it does something now, what the code does and how it does it are probably going to change in the future.

I think no one really updates this field and it's a human factor that could otherwise be generated by Hackage reliably. I'm using many packages that are "experimental" or "unstable" that've been stable for a year or more. The field is mostly useless to me. The stability of a package can be judged based on how often the versions bump up based on the PVP and/or the exports of the package change, that is something Hackage could trivially do. Agreed, the naming is also ambiguous, “API stability” seems more straight-forward.

I can't speak for anyone besides myself, but I do update it and its value is determined, for me, in a way that could never be automated. When I mark a package provisional or experimental, I am saying that I am not convinced that the API I've created is the best one I can come up with, and often I have specific plans to ("when I get around to it") change it. It is an indication of intent for, not history of, change. Similarly, when I do reach a design that I'm satisfied with, I change the stability field. But an automated decision system has no conceivable way of knowing that the major change I just made will be the last major change. -- James