John Meacham (john@repetae.net) wrote: Hi John!
I think we are thinking about this the wrong way.
We shouldn't be debating whether haskell needs a haskellforge, but discussing a _coding project_.
As a one who start this discussion (although, after sending my 1st post I found out that HaskellForge was already discussed and Shae put a wiki entry and had a demo on ScannedInAvian.org...i.e. I was not the 1st one discussing the issue), my consideration is that we are mixing apples & oranges...
I think darcs has some great features that can be used in a general source hosting site in novel ways, but the actual software to create the site is the interesting bit we should be deciding how to write. A HaskellForge for helping the haskell community with their projects would simply be one application of said software. but there is nothing keeping people from running it on their own personal, or another large communal site for non-haskell or private or whatever projects.
What I had in mind when writing about HaskellForge is the same thing as Shae put in his post, i.e. "Thesis: The Haskell community needs a HaskellForge." based on personal experience when the gtk2hs project (where I'm offering my humble help) could not satisfy its reqs on SF site. HackageDB alternative is in the category of CPAN, CTAN sites, as already mentioned. otoh, Ruby community has both RubyForge and RAA. The two main Haskell gui libs (gtk2hs & wxhaskell) use SF, and (still) use CVS. The same with ghc - I understand that ghc is around much longer than darcs, and gtk2hs & wxhaskell being on SF cannot use darcs, but as Manuel put wrote nicely regarding ghc & darcs (darcs-users list): <quote> Is Darcs sufficient for fptools? If it is, the one reason to adopt it is because it is written in Haskell, and we like to promote Haskell. </quote> So, having HaskellForge site with darcs (& other services like Hackage) is a nice way to promote Haskell & build its community.
Personally, I think such a project would be very interesting indepedently of whether it is used for a haskellforge or not. So, I think we should concentrate on 'HaskellForge: The OSS darcs based project hosting software' instead of 'HaskellForge: The web site'.
otoh, it does not mean I'm against HaskellForge software - maybe it's better to call such project 'HForge' - but in the present situation HaskellForge does not depend on HForge, i.e. it could be (probably) possible to equip haskell.org site to provide everything to have HaskellForge (sounds practical) and it would serve only Haskell projects as in a present. Let us 1st show an example before jumping on the HForge. Sincerely, Gour -- Registered Linux User | #278493 GPG Public Key | 8C44EDCD