Sterling Clover wrote:
On Nov 9, 2010, at 7:02 AM, Gregory Collins wrote:
Hi all,
Personally I would be fine with that, providing there was a plan towards a community effort to improve the libraries we've *already approved*. To subject maintainers of candidate libraries to the "scanning tunneling electron microscope" while remaining oblivious to the huge usability/documentation problems in our grandfathered libraries --- I'm looking at you, regex-*, HTTP, old-*, QuickCheck, OpenGL, html, xhtml, pretty, etc --- isn't fair in the slightest and is going to discourage people from submitting libraries in the first place.
...
Maybe we should assemble a posse of volunteers, divide up the libraries, and spend a few hours each adding this kind of documentary material to try to make a real impact on the average quality level in the platform. The cynic in me, however, suspects that the willingness to do this kind of grunt work is greatly overshadowed by the appetite to engage in endless rounds of mailing list bickering.
That sounds like a great idea! A weeklong(ish?) "documentation strike force".
Step one, a good strong motivation, like here, but a bit more fleshed out, and sent to -cafe, via reddit as well, etc.
Step two, clearance from maintainers of various packages for their willingness to accept and review significant documentation patches. (I'm sure it will be forthcoming, but it should help momentum to say that authors x, y, and z all give approval and support.)
I'm the current maintainer of HTTP essentially by accident (previous maintainer dropped it, urgent changes needed for GHC compatibility), and I would like to get rid of it if anyone with more time and interest comes along. As such, I can't commit to properly reviewing documentation patches, but I would be happy to accept them without review in that case. However it seems to me that with all these grandfathered packages, the API is potentially rather more of an issue than the documentation, and updating that could be rather more disruptive and painful. Ganesh =============================================================================== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.credit-suisse.com/legal/en/disclaimer_email_ib.html ===============================================================================