[Haskell-cafe] Filing bugs for haskell packages

[Alain O'Dea]

> On Feb 7, 2014, at 21:19, Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+hs at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> 
> Nicolas Trangez wrote:
> 
>>> On Fri, 2014-02-07 at 14:01 +0000, Niklas Hambüchen wrote:
>>> I'm subscribed to > 10 mailing lists of projects for which I report
>>> less
>>> than a bug per year because of exactly this problem, and it is very
>>> annoying.
>> 
>> IMHO this yields a different question: is a mailing list a suitable
>> method to report/track/discuss *bugs* discovered by end-users?
> 
> +1
> 
> The libraries list has uses for discssion of library related issues
> but is not really a good venue for reporting bugs. We should probably
> use a *bug tracker* for bugs.

I'm new to reporting library issues in Haskell.  It seems like the GHC Trac was the effective venue for reporting issues on platform libraries.  Herbert filed the bug for me after I reported it here.

It may be more effective for Hackage to link to a web page with bug reporting instructions rather than a maintainer email.  It certainly reduces the burden on maintainers and provides clarity to reporters.

Lowering the bar on bug reporting too far may facilitate non-constructive complaints.  If there were endemic quality problems or a perception of quality problems in Haskell libraries, lowering the bar would be wise to address that.  I believe that the quality of Haskell libraries and the perception of their quality generally is very high.

Best,
Alain