gcross:

On 10/28/10 12:34 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

More specifically, I copied the Cabal description from another package and then updated all the fields. Except that I forgot to update one. And now I have a package which I've erroneously placed in completely the wrong category.

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who has done this. :-) I second the notion that it would nice to be able to tweak the meta-data of a package after uploading it.

"Status of Infrastructure" questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=hackage&restrict_sr=on&sort=new In fact, there was a recent announcement about this: http://cogracenotes.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/policy-on-hackage-server/ Where you can edit tags live on the new server. -- Don P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:44:04 +0200, Stephen Tetley wrote:

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P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@

Err, Why?

Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me...

Same here - I find mailing lists a lot easier to follow than both the Haskell Reddit and especially StackOverflow. I'm already following Haskell Reddit, but I never found StackOverflow to be very nice :-\ Also, I think that the haskell-beginners mailing list is great, I would be pained to see it abandoned in favor of StackOverflow. Just my 2¢. Aleks

On 29 October 2010 07:53, Daniel Fischer wrote:

On Thursday 28 October 2010 22:44:04, Stephen Tetley wrote:

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On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart wrote:

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"Status of Infrastructure" questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit.

[SNIP]

...

P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@

Err, Why?

Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me...

+ 1

+1; I see no need to sign up for a reddit account to ask a question there, etc. (and the few times I tried to use my OpenID account to answer questions on StackOverflow I couldn't quite work out what some of the options meant, etc.) IIUC, [one of] the prime motivating factor[s] behind both reddit and StackOverflow is the accumulation of "karma", which leads to people posting just to try and accumulate karma even if they don't know what they're talking about. Here, we are (hopefully) above such mundane things. Another point against reddit: Don posted a link to my survey on the naming of fgl a few months back. Someone then queried [1] the two naming choices that were available on reddit rather than reading the discussions that had already taken place here on -cafe or bothering to actually ask _me_. Similar things go with submitted blog posts: rather than discussing the content as comments on the blog post, they discuss them on reddit thus depriving readers of the post itself of what they think. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cp50y/should_the_new_graph_library_... -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

IIUC, [one of] the prime motivating factor[s] behind both reddit and StackOverflow is the accumulation of "karma", which leads to people posting just to try and accumulate karma even if they don't know what they're talking about.  Here, we are (hopefully) above such mundane things.

Er, I suppose I should defend Stack Overflow a bit here. Yes, it has the whole "reputation" score thing, but actually does a pretty good job using it to motivate "good" activity without encouraging the sort of endless inane karma-pandering that tends to show up eventually on more general discussion-oriented sites. Usually the worst thing that happens--at least on the [haskell] tag--is quick-draw answers shooting from the hip and misreading the question slightly. Furthermore, Stack Overflow isn't really a "place to track for information". It's a special-purpose site for programming-related Q&A. You either go there to ask for help with a problem, or you keep an eye out for new questions in order to answer them. It's not a discussion site and the vast majority of -cafe would be horrendously off-topic there (the question starting this thread, for instance, is only tangentially programming-related and probably wouldn't really belong). Also, the questions tend to be simple, beginner-level stuff for the most part, not ones that are likely to interest Haskell veterans (in fact, more advanced questions are liable to go unanswered, other than Simon or Don fielding an occasional question regarding gritty practical details about GHC). So essentially, participating on SO isn't really about the Haskell community as-is; it's about helping people learn Haskell and (by extension) promoting the language and hopefully bringing new people in. And for that purpose, SO's structure and design really do make it a better medium than the alternatives. But I wouldn't fault anyone for not bothering with it, if they're not interested in spending lots of time helping beginners out with the only reward being a slightly larger number on their account profile page.

Another point against reddit: Don posted a link to my survey on the naming of fgl a few months back.  Someone then queried [1] the two naming choices that were available on reddit rather than reading the discussions that had already taken place here on -cafe or bothering to actually ask _me_.  Similar things go with submitted blog posts: rather than discussing the content as comments on the blog post, they discuss them on reddit thus depriving readers of the post itself of what they think.

Speaking of not wanting more places to keep track of, that's precisely why I rarely bother with blog comments and would find discussions on reddit preferable: it's a single place to go, and keeps things more unified and consistent than whatever comment system some random blog has (most of which are more awkward to use than reddit, as well). Of course, having separate discussions going on in each is probably the worst of both worlds. Overall, I expect Don has a better feel than anyone else for where the Haskell community as a whole goes; if he says the balance is shifting away from -cafe I'd take that first as a statement of fact, not advocacy. I'd also venture to guess that, from the standpoint of a newcomer, reddit, Stack Overflow, and the like are the most visible parts of the Haskell community by a good margin, which means that as the community continues to grow any bias in favor of such places will likely do the same. So it goes... - C.

ivan.miljenovic:

Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are "official". Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit?

They're linked from the front page.

ivan.miljenovic:

On 30 October 2010 09:51, Don Stewart wrote:

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ivan.miljenovic:

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Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are "official".  Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit?

They're linked from the front page.

Huh, so they are; shows how long it has been since I looked at the front page. We just need to get haskellers.com listed there now...

I added them in about Nov 2008, FWIW. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Template:Main/Community&oldid=24203

stephen.tetley:

On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart wrote:

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"Status of Infrastructure" questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit.

[SNIP]

...

P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@

Err, Why?

The online services provide searchable content, tagging, and the ability to rate, edit and refer to previous content. E.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/haskell?sort=hot&pagesize=15

Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me...

It's too late. The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff. A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere. -- Don

On 30 October 2010 12:22, Lauri Alanko wrote:

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

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The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff.

A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere.

Do you mean that people have actually unsubscribed from the list in favor of only following web-based media? New people who only join the web forums do not "vote" since they may not even know about the mailing list.

I know that this is a hopeless battle, but since I feel very strongly about this, I'll indulge in defending the mailing list even though this is rather off-topic.

The reasons why I prefer mailing lists (and newsgroups, rest in piece) over web-based discussion forums:

* Usability: mail and news clients provide a consistent interface to  all the discussions, and the customizability and diversity of  clients ensures that everyone can access the discussions the way  they like it. In contrast, web forums come with their built-in  interfaces, and if you don't like them, you are SOL.

* Scalability: related to the above, since mail and news provide a  consistent interface to all the discussions, adding new lists and  groups to be followed requires minimal effort since they just show  up as new items whose updates get tracked automatically. In the  worst case, adding a new web forum to be followed requires visiting  the site frequently to check whether new messages have arrived. RSS  and similar syndication technologies help, thankfully, but support  for them is inconsistent, and often incomplete (they might not  notify about new comments, only new topics). I subscribe to tens of  mailing lists without problems. I wouldn't want to try to follow  tens of web forums regularly.

* Archivability: with mail and news, it is trivial for me to get local  copies of the discussions (and the messages I myself have written)  which I can peruse and search to my heart's content later without  being dependent on the continued functioning of some external  service. Although it is possible to save web pages locally, this  usually very inconvenient, especially if one wants the local copies  to be kept up to date with ongoing discussions.

* Offline support: related to the above, with mail and news fetching  and sending messages are separate from reading and writing  them. Hence one can read and write messages even when one is for  some reason not online. Web forums practically require an online  connection when one wants to read the discussions.

* Neutrality: newsgroups are completely distributed and not controlled  by any single entity. Mailing lists are a centralized service, but a  purely technical one. The haskell.org mailing lists (like the rest  of haskell.org) are directly maintained by the community. In  contrast, external web forums like reddit and stackoverflow are  owned by companies, and visits to the sites bring ad revenue to the  companies. Moreover, the contents of these sites are subject to  deletion (or perhaps even editing) by the whims of their owners.

In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior to web forums, which have required additional technologies (e.g. RSS) to attempt to overcome the obstacles that mail and news solve directly.

It is true that web forums are nowadays very popular and have some nice features that the older technologies don't. The main reason for this, I suspect, is money: mail and news are from the older, more innocent age when internet technology was driven by the desire to communicate efficiently instead of making money. They are by their nature so neutral that they provide no financial incentive to develop them or support them. The web, on the other hand, provides many opportunites to profit by offering services, so it is no wonder that web technologies have flourished in the commercialized internet.

Perhaps this is inevitable, and it is certainly ok for the haskell.org front page to provide links to reddit and stackoverflow just to inform visitors that these sites might be of interest.

But by saying "I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow" you are effectively saying: "please let Condé Nast Digital and Stack Overflow Internet Services, Inc capitalize on your interest in and knowledge of Haskell". I most strongly object to this becoming the standard policy of the Haskell community.

+1; that's pretty much my opinion/arguments as well. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

Daniel Fischer writes:

On Saturday 30 October 2010 03:42:27, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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On 30 October 2010 12:22, Lauri Alanko wrote:

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On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

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The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is [...] In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior [..] +1; that's pretty much my opinion/arguments as well. +1; same here.

I agree too, but not without pointing out that on SO, you'd just be clicking to vote up, rather than quoting the entire mail and adding one line. So there are some advantages. Ivan L. M. wrote:

So you'd prefer to have the discussion about a blog post be made distinct from the blog post itself?

The problem with blog comments and other "web forums" is, in addition to the hopeless interfaces they invariably are equipped with, that they are scattered. I very rarely check back to follow up on comments (except on my own site :-), and I rarely bother to register to add my voice. So, yes, I would like discussion to take place with some central coordinaton. Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs. The important thing is making all the resources visible, and bringing stuff together. HWN is great, I don't follow Reddit, but I do click on the links that look interesting. Is there something going in the other direction, pointing SO users to mailing list threads, for instance? Most web-based email archives seem to suck - where can we point to a nice URL to get an overview of a -cafe thread? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants

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Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs.

Very much this. I mourn Usenet's potential as much as anyone, but life goes on.

Agreed, in principle. However, the quality of discussions on Reddit makes me want to run away more often than not - it is already worse than Usenet was in its last throws (yes, I know it is living an afterlive;-). One thing we learned from Usenet is that trying to add to a thread gone bad is very unlikely to make it any better, and too many Reddit threads go bad so quickly that I've never felt like even trying to improve the signal/noise ratio. Just my own impression, of course (and perhaps the Haskell Reddit doesn't suffer quite as much). Also, while both Reddit and Stack Overflow can be read without Javascript, both require Javascript for posting (can't even log in to Reddit without, and have to edit half-blind in Stack Overflow without). Community-edited sites like these are the last ones on which I'd want to be forced to enable Javascript. Moving from a few Haskell mailing lists to many lists, to added IRC channels, to added blogs and RSS-feeds and aggregators, and added sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow does give more options, but makes it rather harder to follow everthing (in the beginning, feeds and aggregators give you the feeling that you're more up to date than ever, but at some point your feed handler overflows your number of hours per day:-). Which means that it is also getting more and more difficult to reach people as easily as before (do you ask on haskell-cafe, haskell-beginners, reddit, or SO? do you announce on haskell, haskell-cafe, or reddit? do you survey on haskell, haskell-cafe, google, or reddit? do you answer queries on the wiki, on -cafe, on -beginners, on reddit, on SO, or where? and so on..). Some people try to crosspost items to their favourite sites, in the hope of finding them again, in a single place. So many social sites now compete with each other that blog entries come with one-click-forward-this-there buttons. So, I agree with Don that you're missing things if you only follow the -cafe, and I agree with others that the -cafe is the most important forum for me. Overall, I'm not too happy with the way things are diverging, though.. Apart from the Usenet->mailing list move, it also reminds me of the command line->GUI movement - some people are quite happy with tools that at least remind them of command line control (such as most mail readers or programmer's editors), while others want web and guis that do not remind them of something they've never seen or put to good use (the command line prompt). Or perhaps, it is just a tick easier to get started on web forums - you can read without subscribing, you can subscribe without committing yourself (throwaway accounts on reddit, for instance) or installing tools (if I recall correctly, my last Windows notebook no longer came with pre-installed email client..).

As you say, most email archives leave something to be desired. As far as I know, the best way to find anything in old -cafe threads is to do a google search with "site:http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/", and there's no good way to get an "overview". Especially as topic drift leads to subject lines being uninformative (I mean, "Edit Hackage"? What?).

I have the feeling that the existence of 4-5 archives for some Haskell lists means that the Google ranking will be spread among them, giving each a weaker ranking than one would hope for (it certainly didn't help that some time ago, haskell.org had robots banned from its mailing list archives for a while). Btw, does anyone know why searching with "list:haskell-cafe" does not help much, even though every single posting to this list has a "List-Archive:" heading pointing to the pipermail archive? Claus

There's been some grumbling about users migrating from -cafe to Reddit and Stack Overflow in particular. First, as Don has pointed out, the fact is that people are moving away, and that's just the trend. But why are people moving? One reason is that Stack Overflow, Reddit, and -cafe all provide *different things*, with features tailored to specific purposes. I'll try to explain what those things are, why they don't threaten, but augment -cafe, and why we need at least one new mailinglist as well. 1. When Stack Overflow is Better Than -cafe Stack Overflow is *better* for a Q&A format. I can scan for questions I'm competent to answer or interested in answers to (and the rss feed helps with that), and be confident that for the most part there won't be thread derails, and that the title will maintain consistency with the discussion inside. If the title isn't informative, I can be confident that someone with sufficient rights (which are granted by accumulation of karma) will edit it to be informative. Likewise the question itself, if it evolves over time, can be edited to reflect what it should have been to begin with. And most importantly, if an answer to a question is provided on -cafe, it quickly gets drowned in surrounding traffic. And if an answer becomes out of date, there's no good way to "annotate" the archives to indicate that. I don't *need* to read all s.o. questions, on the off chance than an answer might become relevant to me later. I know that s.o. provides the right tools so I can find the answer when I need it. And I know that s.o. lets users update pages with new posts, or edits, so that answers don't become "stale" over time. A technical Q&A site serves different purposes than a mailinglist, and it needs different technology to do so. There are other, smaller, advantages to stackoverflow which I haven't even touched on. 2. When Reddit is Better Than -cafe As for reddit, while some people obviously treat -cafe as an anything goes place to crack jokes or pursue arguments of rather narrow interest, I'm acutely aware that every message sent to this list lands in the mailbox of thousands some multiple thousands of programmers, many very talented, and almost all with better things to do than wade through the massive traffic of -cafe for the few things of interest to them. So, generally, I tend to shy away from posting to -cafe. Reddit, on the other hand has (although maybe a bit too much) a bit more of the freewheeling atmosphere of, e.g., the #haskell irc channel. People are going to reddit during a long compile, or on a coffee break. There's an understanding that the conversation will tend to be casual, that there will be occasional trolls and occasional gems, and that the primary content will be in high-quality links to papers, blogposts, articles, etc., while the discussion threads will be a way to shoot the breeze about them. This distinction between content and chatter is in many ways a useful thing. Again, the medium of reddit facilitates this type of content. Because messages are shown in their threaded context with relatively high information density, they don't have to quote or indicate their surrounding context. The incremental cost of each message, both to reader and writer, is tiny, and this facilitates a more free-flowing conversational style than over email. Again, upvotes and downvotes (the dreaded ratings and karma) make it easy to see immediately which points others found useful or bogus, and to register simple agreement or disagreement without adding more semantic noise to the mix. 3. How -cafe Can Be Better than -cafe If Stack Overflow is better for Q&A and Reddit is better for link aggregation and casual chat, that doesn't mean that -cafe should lose subscribers, or pack up and go home. It means that -cafe can shed those aspects, and get on with what *is* better here. For example, the recent set of DSL conversations have been very rich and productive. And I can't think of an online fora besides -cafe where they could have taken place. In one sense, because -cafe has too many posts, it in fact has too few subscribers. Plenty of people who do great work in Haskell, either as academics or commercially, don't have the time and energy to devote to -cafe, even though there are conversations that would be perfect for them. -cafe has averaged about 50 posts/day for this last month. Of those, I'd say about 2/3 are on topic for what I'd like -cafe to be. Some followed from release announcements which led into discussions of some aspect of the project. Some were related to issues with standard libraries, widely-used packages or otherwise relevant to the whole of the Haskell community. Some were well served by "taking the temperature" of the Haskell community (e.g. the lambda-case discussion). And some were questions suited to generating a broad discussion rather than one or two correct single answers. The other third, by my estimation, would have been equally or better served on Stack Overflow. 4. Towards haskell-community@haskell.org! Of the the 2/3 of -cafe messages on topic, maybe half or those were all related to haddocks, or issues facing the haskell wiki (i.e. the blurb, wiki organization, etc.) or the new Haskellers.com site. This suggests to me that we have a growing understanding that we need to chip-in together to contribute to resources for the Haskell community, and there's a great deal of discussion to be had on plenty of details. But such discussion is not for everybody. So I would propose a separate haskell-community mailing list specifically for discussions over, e.g, unified design or the design of individual Haskell community sites, technical issues regarding Haskell community sites, social decisions regarding Haskell community sites -- i.e. on policies for the new Hackage regarding package maintainership, etc. Such a list would, among other things, server as a soundingboard/resource for the haskell.org committee. Cheers, Sterl P.S. There's also a fair amount of posts that I think could have been saved for reddit, or not at all, but I won't name names :-)

On 31 October 2010 04:08, Sterling Clover wrote:

How can we make Haskell-Cafe scale? There's been some grumbling about users migrating from -cafe to Reddit and Stack Overflow in particular. First, as Don has pointed out, the fact is that people are moving away, and that's just the trend.

I really don't think the amount of Haskell discussion is so large on Haskell-Cafe. I've seen maybe 5 new threads started all day. If complaints of being swamped by messages is the cause, then it seems people tend not to know how to ignore a thread with their client. For me, today has been like a ghost town in Haskell-Cafe, but I set threads I don't want to read to ignore. Regardless, I do think SO, Reddit, Planet Haskell, Meetup, HaskellWiki, hpaste, Github, Haskellers, the IRC, etc etc etc. serve their specific purpose well, and using them is good. But the Haskell community really is not that big that we need to further partition it and spread it thin. How many different channels can people be bothered to monitor? On 31 October 2010 22:43, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

As for the large number of posts: as far as I'm aware most email clients allow you to say "mark all messages in this thread as read" under some guise or another so you don't have to actually read each email just to stop your client telling you that you have new mail.

GMail, for example, has the "mute" feature, to stop emails being shown in the inbox for a given "conversation" (thread).