Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 11:18:37AM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> I'm wondering whether a better way to run the process is to have the
> maintainer more involed in the process of nomination.  Instead of
> nominating a package for inclusion in the platform, a mainatiner
> would "donate" a package for inclusion.  By doing so they would also
> be implicitly relinquishing some of the responsibilty for the design
> of the package to the community.  This is the way I think the
> platform should work - it's not just a quality control on packages,
> but a process by which we build a sound baseline set of APIs for
> Haskell development.  In order to do that, we need to have the
> community responsible for the whole of the platform, not just the
> entry bar.

What you're describing is approximately making packages subject to
the libraries submission process.  (Which is what I'm doing with the
transformers package currently proposed for HP.)  That could work
to produce consistent APIs, but I can't see it being accepted as a
condition for membership of the HP.

Let's do both:
- a set of packages under community control that we're trying to make
  consistent.
- a set of package versions that are popular, meet objective standards
  and have been tested to build together.
But let's not try to force these to be the same.