We currently have *3* wikis:
https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0>
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc
https://phabricator.haskell.org/w/
I didn’t even know about the third of these, but the first two have clearly
differentiated goals:
·
https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0>
is about user-facing, and often user-generated, documentation. Guidance about
improving performance, programming idioms, tutorials etc.
· https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc is about GHC’s implementation,
oriented to people who want to understand how GHC works, and how to modify it.
I think this separation is actually quite helpful.
I agree with what you and others say about the difficulty of keeping wikis
organised. But that’s not primarily a technology issue: there is a genuinely
difficult challenge here. How do you build and maintain up-to-date, navigable,
well-organised information about a large, complex, and rapidly changing
artefact like GHC? A wiki is one approach that has the merit that anyone can
improve it; control is not centralised. But I’d love there to be other, better
solutions.
Simon
From: ghc-devs [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sven Panne
Sent: 27 September 2016 08:46
To: ghc-devs <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: How, precisely, can we improve?
Just a remark from my side: The documentation/tooling landscape is a bit more
fragmented than it needs to be IMHO. More concretely:
* We currently have *3* wikis:
https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwiki.haskell.org%2FHaskell&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=fxYacdt9XklXJaGetQABBI%2BG3IgnlJmB2r1EL54I1HU%3D&reserved=0>
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc
https://phabricator.haskell.org/w/
It's clear to me that they have different emphases and different origins,
but in the end this results in valuable information being scattered around.
Wikis in general are already quite hard to navigate (due to their inherent
chaotic "structure"), so having 3 of them makes things even worse. It would be
great to have *the* single Haskell Wiki directly on
haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0>
in an easily reachable place.
* To be an active Haskell community member, you need quite a few different
logins: Some for the Wikis mentioned above, one for Hackage, another one for
Phabricator, perhaps an SSH key here and there... Phabricator is a notable
exception: It accepts your GitHub/Google+/... logins. It would be great if the
other parts of the Haskell ecosystem accepted those kinds of logins, too.
*
https://haskell-lang.org/<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org%2F&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=9ndNQVeDQy7lPb4qmn13k%2BAtztK8F9Hq%2B2jeXKm9YFU%3D&reserved=0>
has great stuff on it, but its relationship to
haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0>
is unclear to me. Their "documentation" sub-pages look extremely similar, but
haskell-lang.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=G9e%2BVDuPTtZHZl%2BGd2fFShUznQjDa158JENjoMiD0VY%3D&reserved=0>
has various (great!) tutorials and a nice overview of common libraries on it.
From an external POV it seems to me that
haskell-lang.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell-lang.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=G9e%2BVDuPTtZHZl%2BGd2fFShUznQjDa158JENjoMiD0VY%3D&reserved=0>
should be seamlessly integrated into
haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0>,
i.e. merged into it. Having an endless sea of links on
haskell.org<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fhaskell.org&data=01%7C01%7Csimonpj%40microsoft.com%7C28109c89abb14244f87908d3e6aa6198%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1&sdata=%2F8JlCXTwn%2FB8EyrW4BkY0QTS57X%2BFvs4BSXijqCbiNA%3D&reserved=0>
is not the same as having content nicely integrated into it, sorted by topic,
etc.
All those points are not show-stoppers for people trying to be more active in
the Haskell community, but nevertheless they make things harder than they need
to be, so I fear we lose people quite early. To draw an analogy: As probably
everybody who actively monitors their web shop/customer site knows, even
seemlingy small things moves customers totally away from your site. One unclear
payment form? The vast majority of your potential customers aborts the purchase
immediately and forever. One confusing interstitial web page? Say goodbye to
lots of people. One hard-to-find button/link? A forced login/new account? =>
Commercial disaster, etc. etc.
Furthermore, I'm quite aware of the technical/social difficulties of my
proposals, but that shouldn't let us stop trying to improve...
Cheers,
S.
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