<a href="http://patch-tag.com">patch-tag.com</a> has wikis now.<div><br></div><div>They are some buggy behaviors I still need to address so I haven't blogged or otherwise drawn attention to it (arrrg) but my hope is that, quite soon, this will be quite slick and quite useful.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/12/11 Marc Weber <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:marco-oweber@gmx.de">marco-oweber@gmx.de</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
hackage is success because:<br>
a) many (most) people do use it (by uploading packages)<br>
b) it is a comprehensive list of availible packages if not the most<br>
comprehensive one<br>
<br>
Duncan, can you write about your concerns briefly why some maintainers may dislike<br>
this idea ?<br>
<br>
Hackage is missing one feature:<br>
It is very static. I mean if you have a patch or a question or a comment<br>
you have to lookup the darcs repository, write the patch then contact<br>
the author and wait.. If the author replies everything is fine.<br>
If he doesn't you don't know what to do. And if he does your commitment<br>
still doesn't show up on hackage.<br>
<br>
Using a wiki page for each project enables anybody to add comments.<br>
I'm thinking about this kind of comments:<br>
<br>
"Interlude doesn't work for me. It looks like the interlude.h file<br>
passes a tuple to the reportError function which doesn't expect a tuple.<br>
You can fix it by removing the "," in the .h file.<br>
Try this patch:<br>
<a href="http://github.com/MarcWeber/haskell-nix-overlay/blob/master/patches/interlude-0.1.1.patch" target="_blank">http://github.com/MarcWeber/haskell-nix-overlay/blob/master/patches/interlude-0.1.1.patch</a><br>
"<br>
<br>
Of course I mailed the author. Looking at the package again I noticed<br>
that it was uploaded by someone else: GwernBranwen.<br>
gwern on #haskell told me that the author is responsive so I'll just<br>
wait some days, but others will try and fail as well.<br>
If the other person is new to haskell he may not find the fix<br>
fast. He just wants to know which of the heads is causing trouble..<br>
<br>
Another use case would be users adding<br>
"If you're interested in this topic also have a look at XXX"<br>
<br>
Yet another use case is someone figuring out that function X was removed<br>
in version Y. He could than add a note<br>
<br>
x vanished since v.10 and everybody who wants to update cabal dependency<br>
constraints doesn't have to download the darcs repo to figure out that<br>
he should use package <= v.10 .<br>
<br>
Of course contents of wiki pages may be totally wrong because the<br>
contents were written by people knowing the package less than the<br>
maintainers and authors. But everyone knows this and will take care.<br>
<br>
This wiki can server as fail over if the maintainer is on holiday.<br>
<br>
This wiki page will prevent people blogging about packages and benchmark<br>
results anywhere on the internet. So it's much more likely that this<br>
information is read and maintained.<br>
If you use google to look for bug fixes or such you may have success.<br>
But very often you end up reading pages dated 3 years ago which are<br>
outdated.<br>
<br>
This wiki page would be I simple effective way letting users annotate<br>
packages.<br>
<br>
Costs: Make hackage add one link.<br>
It would look like this: <a href="http://mawercer.de/~marc/hackage-link-example.jpg" target="_blank">http://mawercer.de/~marc/hackage-link-example.jpg</a><br>
This link should point to the existing haskell wiki on <a href="http://haskell.org" target="_blank">haskell.org</a>:<br>
<a href="http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/project-name-without-version" target="_blank">http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/project-name-without-version</a><br>
<br>
<br>
Even if the maintainer is availible 24/h a day he won't upload a new<br>
minor version to hackage for each change. But maybe he'll paste a small<br>
note that the darcs repo is more up to date fixing issue x/y.<br>
You don't want to upload a new version because you added some<br>
documentation.<br>
Why don't you want to do that ?<br>
It's because hackage will keep every version which was uploaded once by<br>
design. Having 50 versions of one package just causes much more work for<br>
tools such as cabal install or hack-nix. Figuring out a solution to<br>
install all packages is hard enough.<br>
<br>
Maintainers can create the wiki page and subscribe to change<br>
notifications. So I don't think it'll be that much work for them to keep<br>
an eye on those wiki pages.<br>
<br>
How do you think about it?<br>
It's about centralizing information and saving your and my time.<br>
Many packages aready do have a wiki page. So why not make it easier for<br>
all to add one?<br>
<br>
Thoughts ?<br>
<br>
Currently my goal is updating some common packages so that they use<br>
extensible exceptions and base4.<br>
But when working on some patches I'd like to tell people that I'm doing<br>
so. I can't in an easy way. That's why I'm starting this thread.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Marc Weber<br>
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