On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:55 -0800, Isaac Jones wrote:
I think this is quite cool, but there's one thing that concerns me.
I fear that users will have the sense that these links are being monitored by the module authors and that if they make a comment like, "there's an error here" or "here's an enhancement" that someone is actually going to see it and modify the haddock. In reality, there's no real way to know whether anyone will ever read a comment. There will be far too many pages for anyone to monitor (unless someone is going to watch an RSS feed or something).
This might actually deter people from modifying the haddock code directly and submitting patches, since they did their part by commenting on the function.
I'd encourage you to consider how it might interact with the new trac ticket system also. Maybe there should be a "spot a bug" or "make a suggestion" link that creates a trac bug.
This is a good point. Let me suggest some possible technical solutions: It is possible to monitor a number of related wiki pages. Since all the module pages would be sub-pages of some existing page then by monitoring the root page for changes in its related pages one could see all changes in the sub pages. MediaWiki does also have some support for RSS. I've not looked into that in detail however. In addition a feature that we might be able to implement for the wiki is to have all the newly created sub pages of a library's root page contain some default text rather than starting off blank. That default text should mention the purpose of the page and where to go instead for reporting bugs. If that's too tricky to implement then perhaps one should just go and pre-create all the wiki pages for each module with the appropriate initial text. This would not be too much of a chore for most libraries which only expose a handful of modules. It'd take me a bit longer since Gtk2Hs has 100+ modules, but it's not intolerable. It can be made simpler by the use of a MediaWiki template that contains th text. Then the info can be written once and appear on each page (and if the template changes the other pages update automatically). Duncan