Re: [Haskell-cafe] Notes from Haskell takes over the world BoF at ICFP

2010-10-07 Thread Neil Mitchell
Hi

 Digressing a little, can anyone interested in doing so merge hoogle
 and Hayoo and make them part of Hackage?

I am currently working on this in my spare time. I hope to have
something to show in the next month.

Thanks, Neil
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[Haskell-cafe] Notes from Haskell takes over the world BoF at ICFP

2010-10-06 Thread Don Stewart
Here  are the notes transcribed from the Future of Haskell BoF held
after the Haskell Symposium last week.

-- Don




= Future of Haskell BoF Notes =

A birds of a feather meeting was held at ICFP, organized by Bryan and
Johan. We had 30 (?) people in a room, for 2 hours, discussing how to
ensure Haskell succeeds.

These are the transcribed notes.

== Libraries ==

 * Need to encourage special interest groups (SIGs) to form around
   particular domain areas in the libraries. AI, BioInf, Networking,
   etc.

 * Document the SIG process: what resources they have, how you get
   results.

 * Missing SIGs for certain platforms: Mac, CentOS etc.

 * More tutorials on use of Haskell in particular domains.

 * Keen for Hackage 2.0 quality review tools: embedded wikis, voting

 * Hackage analysis tools: reverse indexing of the code base.
  
 * There is no PVP tool.

 * Library fragmentation occuring due to type duplication (String, Text, ...)

 * Focus on intitiatives for common, core types. HP polish. 

 * What is the Son of Containers going  to be?

 * Build reports would help the community a lot. Integrated with
   Hackage. Haddock pages on hackage should be editable wikis
   (per-top-level function, dvcs backed? record history, captchas. roll
   back spam, by default assume good contributions)

 * Need to register patches to packages with lost maintainers. 

 * Belgium Hackathon coming up.

 * Improve libraries process: esp. for small contributions.

 * Hackage maintainance:
+ maintainer timeout.
+ hackage package clobbering.
+ tweaks. hackage-local .cabal fixes.

 * Unclear what the rules for contributing are. Document them!

 * In particular, document how to contribute to:
* ghc
* cabal
* core and HP
* hackage 
* dockathon

== IDEs ==

 * A new ghci.
+ scriptable, scion-server?
+ repls on top of ghc-api
+ ruby repl
+ .ghci
+ documentation
+ hpaste/ghci.

 *  IDE
+ scion. contributions. market places.
+ documentation.
+ EclipseFP, scion?
+ NetBeans.

 * Special Interest Groups
+ as the vehicle for domain projects.
+ formal process for forming a group.
+ a small amount of structure for groups
+ document process for forming a strike team.

 * haskell.org
+ polishing the wiki.
+ wikibooks.
+ call for sig.

 * haskell visual design group?
+ consistent color themes across haskell.org sites.
+ consistent haskell branding.

 * community server mailing lists in poor state

 * Move community more online ? Community services.
+ google groups
+ digests.
+ reply at the right point in the threads.
+ serious lists.
+ ghc users. libraries.
+ announces.
+ stackoverflow for new questions?
+ keep refering to SO.
+ reddit for news?

== GHC ==

 * ghc status
+ 50% split in room on moving ghc from darcs to git.
+ bug reports and interaction load with ghc
+ well documented workflow for lightweight changes
+ heavy weight process for major work.
+ bugs, tickets.
+ Simon Marlow contributions are going up, and process is working well
 
 * Release schedule.
+ RC at ICFP.
+ GHC release page.
+ HP/GHC release.
+ stage releases. 
+ more clearly announced that ghc will be a beta prior to GHC HP.

 * HP, uses GHC installers as is. GHC zip.

== Teaching / tutorials ==

 * Tutorials. Documentation.
+ Writing a blog post that is wrong is a pretty good way to get 
feedback.
+ Find a forum to ask the question, so the answer is findable.
+ Ask on SO.
+ Clojure and Scala communities have active blog spheres.
+ they love descriptions of data structures
+ e.g. high fanout trees.
+ Aggregating the ephemera.
+ Archives: Haskell Reddit has all the interesting blog posts.
-- Haskell Wikibook.

 * Cabal and integration with other languages.
+ Easier integration with C.
+ Higher barrier to entry on the Mac.
+ Playing well with other languages?


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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Notes from Haskell takes over the world BoF at ICFP

2010-10-06 Thread Christopher Done
A big thank you, by the way, to you, Simon Marlow, Malcom Wallace and
everyone who helped getting the videos online and those that gave
talks at the Haskell Implementors' Workshop 2010. It was exciting to
watch all the videos! There was a lot of interesting and fertile
discussion.

On 6 October 2010 21:10, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote:
  * Library fragmentation occuring due to type duplication (String, Text, ...)

This one is a big issue for me personally. On hpaste[1] I spent some
time converting between String/Text/ByteString/Lazy-ByteString and did
not have fun.

  * Belgium Hackathon coming up.

See you there!

  * A new ghci.
        + hpaste/ghci.

What were the ideas regarding hpaste? Creating a REPL for pastes?

  *  IDE
        + scion. contributions. market places.
        + documentation.
        + EclipseFP, scion?
        + NetBeans.

I am personally interested in scion. I have the Emacs chops to hack on
that. So far I've been making one-off scripts but it seems like
ultimately the best approach is to focus on using scion to make Emacs
a real quality Haskell environment -- and resulting contributions to
Scion can only benefit other IDEs.

Phyx- from the IRC has been working on some fairly advanced features
for Haskell Visual Studio, for those interested.

  * haskell.org
        + polishing the wiki.
        + wikibooks.
        + call for sig.

I am looking forward to having the new Haskell.org wiki[1] rolled out.
 I and Michael Snoyman have been working on cleaning up the web
development area of the wiki[2]. We really want to make it a central
and useful place for current information on web. dev in Haskell.

[1]: http://new-www.haskell.org/haskellwiki
[2]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web

  * haskell visual design group?
        + consistent color themes across haskell.org sites.
        + consistent haskell branding.

Can we get real web designers on this? Has a colour theme / logo
incarnation been decided yet? Should we make a poll with proposals? I
might whip up a simple web app for posting proposal text + image
attachments and allowing people to vote, if I can't find an existing
one. At least if the choices are static Google Docs suffices for this
and makes it easy to ask the community something.

At the moment I'm still clinging to the old colour theme of purple and
green[3][4], I like this theme but I'm open to switching both of these
web sites to a new theme if we have a consistent, re-usable
stylesheet, palette and SVG logo. I think a consistent theme is very
important.

Domains are also possibly important, too... Haskell.org, hackage,
haddock, Planet Haskell, hpaste, tryhaskell, Hoogle, Hayoo, the
soon-to-be Haskellers.com, etc. I think all these sites that are
really part of the Haskell web network and should have a consistent
theme and quick way to get home to Haskell.org. Imho I suppose it
might be great to also have domain consistency, e.g. haskell.org,
hackage.haskell.org, paste.haskell.org, try.haskell.org,
hoogle/hayoo.haskell.org, planet.haskell.org, etc. We already have a
few of these in use.

Digressing a little, can anyone interested in doing so merge hoogle
and Hayoo and make them part of Hackage?

I plan on making a complete interface to the #haskell IRC channel with
browsing, full text search, stats, common links, marking of
interesting conversations, top posted links, active hours, etc.
basically what pisg provides but... utilizing IRC as a real source of
community knowledge and activity and not just a statistical
curiousity. What I think would be neat but probably won't happen is
irc.haskell.org, but I can always put it on hsirc.org or something.

hpaste.org will interface with this site to provide context for
pastes, e.g. when I'm viewing a paste, I should see maybe ten lines of
conversation and a link to view more, so that I can see what the paste
was about.

I think both hpaste and the IRC channel are untapped sources of
information and I intend on making these two sites utilise that
information. I recently imported the last ten years' worth of IRC into
a postgresql database[5]. I used the clogparse library[6]. For a bit
of fun here's the top-ten Haskell chatters ever:

amelie= select count(*),nick from ircevent where type = 'talk' group
by nick order by 1 desc limit 10;
 count  |nick
+-
 643917 | lambdabot
 265466 | Cale
 248069 | dons
 224690 | shapr
 139449 | quicksilver
  88745 | SamB
  81229 | ski
  75148 | Pseudonym
  73043 | dcoutts
  72337 | ivanm
(10 rows)

[3]: http://tryhaskell.org/
[4]: http://hpaste.org/
[5]: If anyone's interested in the dump, I have uploaded it and can
email you the link. It's 174MB lzma-compressed and 900MB uncompressed.
[6]: 
http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2010/09/clogparse-parsing-haskell-irc-logs.html

        + stackoverflow for new questions?
            + keep refering to SO.

Does this suggest that I should first direct my Haskell technical
questions to SO rather than 

Re: [Haskell-cafe] Notes from Haskell takes over the world BoF at ICFP

2010-10-06 Thread Jason Dagit
At the risk of starting a darcs vs. git discussion I have some
thoughts about the tension.

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote:
[snip]
 == GHC ==

  * ghc status
        + 50% split in room on moving ghc from darcs to git.

I don't see that tension resolving itself easily.  VCS tools are
subject to network effects.  If your friends are using VCS Foo and
you want to work with them, then you adopt Foo too.  It's also a part
of the toolchain that people tend to have strong opinions about.

One possible way to lessen the tension would be good vcs bridge tools.
 There have been numerous repo converter projects, some even
supporting synchronization.  There is already a git-svn tool.  Maybe
there should be a git-darcs (and a darcs-git)?  If a git hacker out
there wants to add darcs support to git, I'd certainly be willing to
help them get started.

Pushing on this a bit more, I'm fairly convinced that darcs and git
are dual to each other in terms of underlying models.  As such, I have
some ideas on how to unify them/convert between models.
Unfortunately, actually having something to use is very far off as the
ideas themselves are still immature.

As far as I can tell, the main reasons to vote for git:
  * Some people simply love git and want to use it for every project
  * Git is faster and/or more memory efficient for some operations (most? all?)
  * Github

As far as I can tell, the main reasons to vote for darcs:
  * GHC already uses it (inertia)
  * The windows support appears to be more mature (I admit, this is
somewhat subjective as neither has a spotless record here)
  * Key players, such as the Simons, prefer the darcs UI over the git
UI (i.e., some people prefer darcs)
  * Darcs 2.x has consistently improved in robustness and efficiency
over the last several years, continues to improve, and incorporates
ideas from git.  (there is currently an experimental 'rebase' command
in the development branch of darcs)
  * Cherry picking

Note: I didn't mention feature branches as a reason to prefer one over
the other.  Both darcs and git support this.  Git uses in-repo
branches and with darcs you can simply do a local lazy get.  Some
people prefer one mechanism over the other, but the point is they both
support the workflow.  I also didn't mention server side bare repos.
I'm trying to focus on the context of what GHC should use and as Simon
Marlow points out, the current darcs workflow is scaling well so it
seems that the lack of darcs bare repos is not an issue at the moment.

I would like to see the tension of darcs vs git for GHC reduced.  I
think it ultimately amounts to: Contributors need to be able to use
the one they prefer, instead of being forced to use the one GHC devs
use.

Us haskellers could build a tool to solve that problem.

        + bug reports and interaction load with ghc

I'd love to get elaboration on this point.

        + well documented workflow for lightweight changes
        + heavy weight process for major work.
            + bugs, tickets.
        + Simon Marlow contributions are going up, and process is working 
 well

That's reassuring.  Is their workflow documented for the benefit of
other Haskell projects and the greater FOSS community in general?

Thanks,
Jason
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