[Haskell-cafe] Package documentation complaints -- and a suggestion

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 25 October 2011 18:54, Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 4:34 AM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:
>> I'm not so sure about that exemption. The "experimental" stability level
>> seems to be the norm on Hackage and often means "I use this for real
>> projects, but because I use it for real projects I'm not quite willing to
>> hammer the API in stone just yet".
>>
>> ...
>>
>> Before dealing with automatic documentation requirements, perhaps it'd be
>> better to develop a standard consensus on the terms used in the stability
>> field and actively advocating for people to adopt it, as was done with the
>> PVP.
>
> I think there's no need to cajole people into it -- if Hackage 2 puts
> "stable" packages on a different / better list, there's your social
> pressure. Right now the stability flag in the .cabal file, as you
> pointed out, is almost completely content-free.

Right, but first we need to define what all those terms _mean_... and
it's no good saying your package is "stable" if you change the API in
a large-scale fashion every release.

Also, by promoting packages that are self-picked as stable, this could
stop people from picking a better package just because the maintainer
is honest enough to state that they're still working on it... I mean,
if base and containers keep changing, what can we _really_ say is a
stable package?

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com