[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Claus Reinke]

> This is a bit tangental, but... One problem I sometimes have is not 
> knowing the status of things. E.g., you read about Associated Types, and 
> then you go "hey, is this implemented now? is it being implemented soon? 
> etc."
> 
> (Don't all rush in and tell me about ATs - I'm only picking it as an 
> example. Others include, say, the GHC debugger, stream fusion, parallel 
> arrays, etc etc etc.)
> 
> Maybe I'm looking wrong, but it often isn't obvious to me how to figure 
> out the answer to the question "does all this cool stuff work yet?" I'm 
> not really sure what we could change to fix that though...

the Haskell Community & Activity Reports were created in part 
to answer that kind of question. within the limitations of 6-monthly 
editions (too frequent for some projects, too infrequent for others),
they have tried to do ever since November 2001, the latest dating
from May 2007:

    http://www.haskell.org/communities/

since contributors are encouraged to look ahead in plans, as well
as look back on achievements, the interval of not knowing where
things stand is actually shorter than 6 months. provided that people
remember to write and submit entries about their favourite haskell 
projects when the editor comes calling before November/May!-)

claus