Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs. Very much this. I mourn Usenet's potential as much as anyone, but life goes on. Agreed, in principle. However, the quality of discussions on Reddit makes me want to run away more often than not - it is already worse than Usenet was in its last throws (yes, I know it is living an afterlive;-). One thing we learned from Usenet is that trying to add to a thread gone bad is very unlikely to make it any better, and too many Reddit threads go bad so quickly that I've never felt like even trying to improve the signal/noise ratio. Just my own impression, of course (and perhaps the Haskell Reddit doesn't suffer quite as much). Also, while both Reddit and Stack Overflow can be read without Javascript, both require Javascript for posting (can't even log in to Reddit without, and have to edit half-blind in Stack Overflow without). Community-edited sites like these are the last ones on which I'd want to be forced to enable Javascript. Moving from a few Haskell mailing lists to many lists, to added IRC channels, to added blogs and RSS-feeds and aggregators, and added sites like Reddit and Stack Overflow does give more options, but makes it rather harder to follow everthing (in the beginning, feeds and aggregators give you the feeling that you're more up to date than ever, but at some point your feed handler overflows your number of hours per day:-). Which means that it is also getting more and more difficult to reach people as easily as before (do you ask on haskell-cafe, haskell-beginners, reddit, or SO? do you announce on haskell, haskell-cafe, or reddit? do you survey on haskell, haskell-cafe, google, or reddit? do you answer queries on the wiki, on -cafe, on -beginners, on reddit, on SO, or where? and so on..). Some people try to crosspost items to their favourite sites, in the hope of finding them again, in a single place. So many social sites now compete with each other that blog entries come with one-click-forward-this-there buttons. So, I agree with Don that you're missing things if you only follow the -cafe, and I agree with others that the -cafe is the most important forum for me. Overall, I'm not too happy with the way things are diverging, though.. Apart from the Usenet-mailing list move, it also reminds me of the command line-GUI movement - some people are quite happy with tools that at least remind them of command line control (such as most mail readers or programmer's editors), while others want web and guis that do not remind them of something they've never seen or put to good use (the command line prompt). Or perhaps, it is just a tick easier to get started on web forums - you can read without subscribing, you can subscribe without committing yourself (throwaway accounts on reddit, for instance) or installing tools (if I recall correctly, my last Windows notebook no longer came with pre-installed email client..). As you say, most email archives leave something to be desired. As far as I know, the best way to find anything in old -cafe threads is to do a google search with site:http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/;, and there's no good way to get an overview. Especially as topic drift leads to subject lines being uninformative (I mean, Edit Hackage? What?). I have the feeling that the existence of 4-5 archives for some Haskell lists means that the Google ranking will be spread among them, giving each a weaker ranking than one would hope for (it certainly didn't help that some time ago, haskell.org had robots banned from its mailing list archives for a while). Btw, does anyone know why searching with list:haskell-cafe does not help much, even though every single posting to this list has a List-Archive: heading pointing to the pipermail archive? Claus ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
Ketil Malde wrote: Most web-based email archives seem to suck - where can we point to a nice URL to get an overview of a -cafe thread? http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/82667 Tillmann ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Saturday 30 October 2010 03:42:27, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote: On 30 October 2010 12:22, Lauri Alanko l...@iki.fi wrote: On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote: The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff. A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere. Do you mean that people have actually unsubscribed from the list in favor of only following web-based media? New people who only join the web forums do not vote since they may not even know about the mailing list. I know that this is a hopeless battle, but since I feel very strongly about this, I'll indulge in defending the mailing list even though this is rather off-topic. The reasons why I prefer mailing lists (and newsgroups, rest in piece) over web-based discussion forums: * Usability: mail and news clients provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, and the customizability and diversity of clients ensures that everyone can access the discussions the way they like it. In contrast, web forums come with their built-in interfaces, and if you don't like them, you are SOL. * Scalability: related to the above, since mail and news provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, adding new lists and groups to be followed requires minimal effort since they just show up as new items whose updates get tracked automatically. In the worst case, adding a new web forum to be followed requires visiting the site frequently to check whether new messages have arrived. RSS and similar syndication technologies help, thankfully, but support for them is inconsistent, and often incomplete (they might not notify about new comments, only new topics). I subscribe to tens of mailing lists without problems. I wouldn't want to try to follow tens of web forums regularly. * Archivability: with mail and news, it is trivial for me to get local copies of the discussions (and the messages I myself have written) which I can peruse and search to my heart's content later without being dependent on the continued functioning of some external service. Although it is possible to save web pages locally, this usually very inconvenient, especially if one wants the local copies to be kept up to date with ongoing discussions. * Offline support: related to the above, with mail and news fetching and sending messages are separate from reading and writing them. Hence one can read and write messages even when one is for some reason not online. Web forums practically require an online connection when one wants to read the discussions. * Neutrality: newsgroups are completely distributed and not controlled by any single entity. Mailing lists are a centralized service, but a purely technical one. The haskell.org mailing lists (like the rest of haskell.org) are directly maintained by the community. In contrast, external web forums like reddit and stackoverflow are owned by companies, and visits to the sites bring ad revenue to the companies. Moreover, the contents of these sites are subject to deletion (or perhaps even editing) by the whims of their owners. In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior to web forums, which have required additional technologies (e.g. RSS) to attempt to overcome the obstacles that mail and news solve directly. It is true that web forums are nowadays very popular and have some nice features that the older technologies don't. The main reason for this, I suspect, is money: mail and news are from the older, more innocent age when internet technology was driven by the desire to communicate efficiently instead of making money. They are by their nature so neutral that they provide no financial incentive to develop them or support them. The web, on the other hand, provides many opportunites to profit by offering services, so it is no wonder that web technologies have flourished in the commercialized internet. Perhaps this is inevitable, and it is certainly ok for the haskell.org front page to provide links to reddit and stackoverflow just to inform visitors that these sites might be of interest. But by saying I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow you are effectively saying: please let Condé Nast Digital and Stack Overflow Internet Services, Inc capitalize on your interest in and knowledge of Haskell. I most strongly object to this becoming the standard policy of the Haskell community. +1; that's pretty much my opinion/arguments as well. +1; same here.
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
Daniel Fischer daniel.is.fisc...@web.de writes: On Saturday 30 October 2010 03:42:27, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote: On 30 October 2010 12:22, Lauri Alanko l...@iki.fi wrote: On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote: The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is [...] In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior [..] +1; that's pretty much my opinion/arguments as well. +1; same here. I agree too, but not without pointing out that on SO, you'd just be clicking to vote up, rather than quoting the entire mail and adding one line. So there are some advantages. Ivan L. M. wrote: So you'd prefer to have the discussion about a blog post be made distinct from the blog post itself? The problem with blog comments and other web forums is, in addition to the hopeless interfaces they invariably are equipped with, that they are scattered. I very rarely check back to follow up on comments (except on my own site :-), and I rarely bother to register to add my voice. So, yes, I would like discussion to take place with some central coordinaton. Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs. The important thing is making all the resources visible, and bringing stuff together. HWN is great, I don't follow Reddit, but I do click on the links that look interesting. Is there something going in the other direction, pointing SO users to mailing list threads, for instance? Most web-based email archives seem to suck - where can we point to a nice URL to get an overview of a -cafe thread? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Ketil Malde ke...@malde.org wrote: Stack Overflow and Reddit are at least improvements over the traditional web forums, starting to acquire some of the features Usenet had twenty years ago. Much like Planet-style meta-blogs and RSS syndication makes it liveable to follow blogs. Very much this. I mourn Usenet's potential as much as anyone, but life goes on. I'll also note that some private sites take reasonable steps to promote openness. To use Stack Overflow as an example again, all content on the site is under a Creative Commons license and they provide torrents of raw data dumps containing everything but private information about users. So if someone wanted, it'd be possible (probably even easy) to do something like mirror all the content in the [haskell] tag somewhere on haskell.org without any advertising or extraneous SO-related stuff cluttering it up, perhaps re-organized into a more structured FAQ format. The important thing is making all the resources visible, and bringing stuff together. HWN is great, I don't follow Reddit, but I do click on the links that look interesting. Is there something going in the other direction, pointing SO users to mailing list threads, for instance? Most web-based email archives seem to suck - where can we point to a nice URL to get an overview of a -cafe thread? Well, it's always good form to provide relevant links in SO answers, but I'm more likely to direct people to the wiki on Haskell.org, the online Haskell report, Hackage, various blogs, or occasional research papers. I have seen relevant -cafe threads mentioned on occasion, typically using the archive at haskell.org/pipermail and linking to a specific message. As you say, most email archives leave something to be desired. As far as I know, the best way to find anything in old -cafe threads is to do a google search with site:http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/;, and there's no good way to get an overview. Especially as topic drift leads to subject lines being uninformative (I mean, Edit Hackage? What?). - C. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 9:13 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com wrote: IIUC, [one of] the prime motivating factor[s] behind both reddit and StackOverflow is the accumulation of karma, which leads to people posting just to try and accumulate karma even if they don't know what they're talking about. Here, we are (hopefully) above such mundane things. Er, I suppose I should defend Stack Overflow a bit here. Yes, it has the whole reputation score thing, but actually does a pretty good job using it to motivate good activity without encouraging the sort of endless inane karma-pandering that tends to show up eventually on more general discussion-oriented sites. Usually the worst thing that happens--at least on the [haskell] tag--is quick-draw answers shooting from the hip and misreading the question slightly. Furthermore, Stack Overflow isn't really a place to track for information. It's a special-purpose site for programming-related QA. You either go there to ask for help with a problem, or you keep an eye out for new questions in order to answer them. It's not a discussion site and the vast majority of -cafe would be horrendously off-topic there (the question starting this thread, for instance, is only tangentially programming-related and probably wouldn't really belong). Also, the questions tend to be simple, beginner-level stuff for the most part, not ones that are likely to interest Haskell veterans (in fact, more advanced questions are liable to go unanswered, other than Simon or Don fielding an occasional question regarding gritty practical details about GHC). So essentially, participating on SO isn't really about the Haskell community as-is; it's about helping people learn Haskell and (by extension) promoting the language and hopefully bringing new people in. And for that purpose, SO's structure and design really do make it a better medium than the alternatives. But I wouldn't fault anyone for not bothering with it, if they're not interested in spending lots of time helping beginners out with the only reward being a slightly larger number on their account profile page. Another point against reddit: Don posted a link to my survey on the naming of fgl a few months back. Someone then queried [1] the two naming choices that were available on reddit rather than reading the discussions that had already taken place here on -cafe or bothering to actually ask _me_. Similar things go with submitted blog posts: rather than discussing the content as comments on the blog post, they discuss them on reddit thus depriving readers of the post itself of what they think. Speaking of not wanting more places to keep track of, that's precisely why I rarely bother with blog comments and would find discussions on reddit preferable: it's a single place to go, and keeps things more unified and consistent than whatever comment system some random blog has (most of which are more awkward to use than reddit, as well). Of course, having separate discussions going on in each is probably the worst of both worlds. Overall, I expect Don has a better feel than anyone else for where the Haskell community as a whole goes; if he says the balance is shifting away from -cafe I'd take that first as a statement of fact, not advocacy. I'd also venture to guess that, from the standpoint of a newcomer, reddit, Stack Overflow, and the like are the most visible parts of the Haskell community by a good margin, which means that as the community continues to grow any bias in favor of such places will likely do the same. So it goes... - C. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 30 October 2010 05:51, C. McCann c...@uptoisomorphism.net wrote: Speaking of not wanting more places to keep track of, that's precisely why I rarely bother with blog comments and would find discussions on reddit preferable: it's a single place to go, and keeps things more unified and consistent than whatever comment system some random blog has (most of which are more awkward to use than reddit, as well). Of course, having separate discussions going on in each is probably the worst of both worlds. So you'd prefer to have the discussion about a blog post be made distinct from the blog post itself? Why not keep them together, also so that people finding the blog post from someplace other than reddit (e.g. planet.haskell.org) can find them? Overall, I expect Don has a better feel than anyone else for where the Haskell community as a whole goes; if he says the balance is shifting away from -cafe I'd take that first as a statement of fact, not advocacy. I'd also venture to guess that, from the standpoint of a newcomer, reddit, Stack Overflow, and the like are the most visible parts of the Haskell community by a good margin, which means that as the community continues to grow any bias in favor of such places will likely do the same. So it goes... Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are official. Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit? -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
ivan.miljenovic: Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are official. Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit? They're linked from the front page. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 30 October 2010 09:51, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: ivan.miljenovic: Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are official. Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit? They're linked from the front page. Huh, so they are; shows how long it has been since I looked at the front page. We just need to get haskellers.com listed there now... -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
ivan.miljenovic: On 30 October 2010 09:51, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: ivan.miljenovic: Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are official. Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit? They're linked from the front page. Huh, so they are; shows how long it has been since I looked at the front page. We just need to get haskellers.com listed there now... I added them in about Nov 2008, FWIW. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Template:Main/Communityoldid=24203 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com wrote: So you'd prefer to have the discussion about a blog post be made distinct from the blog post itself? Why not keep them together, also so that people finding the blog post from someplace other than reddit (e.g. planet.haskell.org) can find them? Well, I'd most prefer that absolutely everything I'm interested in be conveniently kept together in one place, of course, but that's not really practical. Failing that, yes, I think reddit (or something like it) makes a better medium for discussion of broad topics than does the comment system on most blogs. Given a shared subject matter, e.g. Haskell, having one place with discussions about relevant posts from multiple blogs provides a richer overall context than does any one individual post. Anyway, lots of blogs these days have little submit/discuss this post on four-hundred-and-thirteen different web 2.0 social news sites!! buttons after every post, so it's not exactly hard to find them... Neither the Haskell reddit nor Stack Overflow are linked to from haskell.org and there is nothing to indicate that they are official. I skimmed the last couple months of archives for beginn...@haskell.org, found some straightforward questions, and for each one put a few keywords into a google search. About half the time there was a relevant question on Stack Overflow in the first page of results, at least once actually showing up ahead of the mail message I was searching based off of. The idea of community is a rather fluid and consensus-based sort of thing. At some point, visibility is the same thing as being official. (And yes, they are actually linked from haskell.org, but I'm not sure how much that's really worth.) Also, wasn't it Don that started (and is mainly responsible) for linking to Haskell articles on reddit? Maybe. Is there anything related to publicising Haskell that Don *hasn't* done? :) And I think he's only mainly responsible insofar as he tends to find and submit the good links first. - C. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote: The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff. A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere. Do you mean that people have actually unsubscribed from the list in favor of only following web-based media? New people who only join the web forums do not vote since they may not even know about the mailing list. I know that this is a hopeless battle, but since I feel very strongly about this, I'll indulge in defending the mailing list even though this is rather off-topic. The reasons why I prefer mailing lists (and newsgroups, rest in piece) over web-based discussion forums: * Usability: mail and news clients provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, and the customizability and diversity of clients ensures that everyone can access the discussions the way they like it. In contrast, web forums come with their built-in interfaces, and if you don't like them, you are SOL. * Scalability: related to the above, since mail and news provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, adding new lists and groups to be followed requires minimal effort since they just show up as new items whose updates get tracked automatically. In the worst case, adding a new web forum to be followed requires visiting the site frequently to check whether new messages have arrived. RSS and similar syndication technologies help, thankfully, but support for them is inconsistent, and often incomplete (they might not notify about new comments, only new topics). I subscribe to tens of mailing lists without problems. I wouldn't want to try to follow tens of web forums regularly. * Archivability: with mail and news, it is trivial for me to get local copies of the discussions (and the messages I myself have written) which I can peruse and search to my heart's content later without being dependent on the continued functioning of some external service. Although it is possible to save web pages locally, this usually very inconvenient, especially if one wants the local copies to be kept up to date with ongoing discussions. * Offline support: related to the above, with mail and news fetching and sending messages are separate from reading and writing them. Hence one can read and write messages even when one is for some reason not online. Web forums practically require an online connection when one wants to read the discussions. * Neutrality: newsgroups are completely distributed and not controlled by any single entity. Mailing lists are a centralized service, but a purely technical one. The haskell.org mailing lists (like the rest of haskell.org) are directly maintained by the community. In contrast, external web forums like reddit and stackoverflow are owned by companies, and visits to the sites bring ad revenue to the companies. Moreover, the contents of these sites are subject to deletion (or perhaps even editing) by the whims of their owners. In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior to web forums, which have required additional technologies (e.g. RSS) to attempt to overcome the obstacles that mail and news solve directly. It is true that web forums are nowadays very popular and have some nice features that the older technologies don't. The main reason for this, I suspect, is money: mail and news are from the older, more innocent age when internet technology was driven by the desire to communicate efficiently instead of making money. They are by their nature so neutral that they provide no financial incentive to develop them or support them. The web, on the other hand, provides many opportunites to profit by offering services, so it is no wonder that web technologies have flourished in the commercialized internet. Perhaps this is inevitable, and it is certainly ok for the haskell.org front page to provide links to reddit and stackoverflow just to inform visitors that these sites might be of interest. But by saying I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow you are effectively saying: please let Condé Nast Digital and Stack Overflow Internet Services, Inc capitalize on your interest in and knowledge of Haskell. I most strongly object to this becoming the standard policy of the Haskell community. Cheers, Lauri ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 30 October 2010 12:22, Lauri Alanko l...@iki.fi wrote: On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 01:55:12PM -0700, Don Stewart wrote: The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff. A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere. Do you mean that people have actually unsubscribed from the list in favor of only following web-based media? New people who only join the web forums do not vote since they may not even know about the mailing list. I know that this is a hopeless battle, but since I feel very strongly about this, I'll indulge in defending the mailing list even though this is rather off-topic. The reasons why I prefer mailing lists (and newsgroups, rest in piece) over web-based discussion forums: * Usability: mail and news clients provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, and the customizability and diversity of clients ensures that everyone can access the discussions the way they like it. In contrast, web forums come with their built-in interfaces, and if you don't like them, you are SOL. * Scalability: related to the above, since mail and news provide a consistent interface to all the discussions, adding new lists and groups to be followed requires minimal effort since they just show up as new items whose updates get tracked automatically. In the worst case, adding a new web forum to be followed requires visiting the site frequently to check whether new messages have arrived. RSS and similar syndication technologies help, thankfully, but support for them is inconsistent, and often incomplete (they might not notify about new comments, only new topics). I subscribe to tens of mailing lists without problems. I wouldn't want to try to follow tens of web forums regularly. * Archivability: with mail and news, it is trivial for me to get local copies of the discussions (and the messages I myself have written) which I can peruse and search to my heart's content later without being dependent on the continued functioning of some external service. Although it is possible to save web pages locally, this usually very inconvenient, especially if one wants the local copies to be kept up to date with ongoing discussions. * Offline support: related to the above, with mail and news fetching and sending messages are separate from reading and writing them. Hence one can read and write messages even when one is for some reason not online. Web forums practically require an online connection when one wants to read the discussions. * Neutrality: newsgroups are completely distributed and not controlled by any single entity. Mailing lists are a centralized service, but a purely technical one. The haskell.org mailing lists (like the rest of haskell.org) are directly maintained by the community. In contrast, external web forums like reddit and stackoverflow are owned by companies, and visits to the sites bring ad revenue to the companies. Moreover, the contents of these sites are subject to deletion (or perhaps even editing) by the whims of their owners. In short, the old technologies of mail and news are technically vastly superior to web forums, which have required additional technologies (e.g. RSS) to attempt to overcome the obstacles that mail and news solve directly. It is true that web forums are nowadays very popular and have some nice features that the older technologies don't. The main reason for this, I suspect, is money: mail and news are from the older, more innocent age when internet technology was driven by the desire to communicate efficiently instead of making money. They are by their nature so neutral that they provide no financial incentive to develop them or support them. The web, on the other hand, provides many opportunites to profit by offering services, so it is no wonder that web technologies have flourished in the commercialized internet. Perhaps this is inevitable, and it is certainly ok for the haskell.org front page to provide links to reddit and stackoverflow just to inform visitors that these sites might be of interest. But by saying I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow you are effectively saying: please let Condé Nast Digital and Stack Overflow Internet Services, Inc capitalize on your interest in and knowledge of Haskell. I most strongly object to this becoming the standard policy of the Haskell community. +1; that's pretty much my opinion/arguments as well. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 10/28/10 12:34 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote: More specifically, I copied the Cabal description from another package and then updated all the fields. Except that I forgot to update one. And now I have a package which I've erroneously placed in completely the wrong category. I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who has done this. :-) I second the notion that it would nice to be able to tweak the meta-data of a package after uploading it. Cheers, Greg ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
gcross: On 10/28/10 12:34 PM, Andrew Coppin wrote: More specifically, I copied the Cabal description from another package and then updated all the fields. Except that I forgot to update one. And now I have a package which I've erroneously placed in completely the wrong category. I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who has done this. :-) I second the notion that it would nice to be able to tweak the meta-data of a package after uploading it. Status of Infrastructure questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/search?q=hackagerestrict_sr=onsort=new In fact, there was a recent announcement about this: http://cogracenotes.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/policy-on-hackage-server/ Where you can edit tags live on the new server. -- Don P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: Status of Infrastructure questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. [SNIP] P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ Err, Why? Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me... ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 22:44:04 +0200, Stephen Tetley stephen.tet...@gmail.com wrote: P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ Err, Why? Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me... Same here - I find mailing lists a lot easier to follow than both the Haskell Reddit and especially StackOverflow. I'm already following Haskell Reddit, but I never found StackOverflow to be very nice :-\ Also, I think that the haskell-beginners mailing list is great, I would be pained to see it abandoned in favor of StackOverflow. Just my 2¢. Aleks ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
stephen.tetley: On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: Status of Infrastructure questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. [SNIP] P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ Err, Why? The online services provide searchable content, tagging, and the ability to rate, edit and refer to previous content. E.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/haskell?sort=hotpagesize=15 Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me... It's too late. The number of subscribers to the Haskell Reddit, for example, is double the -cafe@, and there are comparable numbers of questions being asked on the Stack Overflow [haskell] tag, as here -- so anyone who only reads -cafe@ is already missing a lot of stuff. A lot of the community has already voted on the efficacy of mailing lists for large communities, by moving their discussion elsewhere. -- Don ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Thursday 28 October 2010 22:44:04, Stephen Tetley wrote: On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: Status of Infrastructure questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. [SNIP] P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ Err, Why? Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me... + 1 ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 12:34, Andrew Coppin andrewcop...@btinternet.com wrote: Today I uploaded a package to Hackage, and rediscovered something that you already know: I'm an idiot. More specifically, I copied the Cabal description from another package and then updated all the fields. Except that I forgot to update one. And now I have a package which I've erroneously placed in completely the wrong category. Don't worry; of all the various ways to screw up a Hackage upload, setting the wrong category is just about the least important. Wait until you've got a few dozen packages in the air, and your hair will turn grey ;) Is there any danger that at some point in the future, it might be possible to edit a package /after/ it has been released on Hackage? There are several reasons why you might wish to do this (beyond realising you did something wrong five minutes after hitting the upload button): Sadly, the current Hackage maintainers follow the immutability is good school of design. A few aspects of packages can be modified, but most (those contained in the .cabal file) cannot. The maintainer might change. The homepage might move. Both of these are handled by uploading a package with a _._._.Z version number; in general, package version numbers are: X.X.Y.Z X.X - the package's major version. Bump this when there's a backwards-incompatible change (eg, dependent packages might break) Y - minor version. Bump this when the package changes, but in a backwards-compatible way. Z - patch version. Bump this when you just change something that doesn't affect the code itself (comments, documentation, cabal properties) A better package might come along, making the existing one obsolete. The only way to mark packages as obsolete, as far as I know, is to email a Hackage administrator. Or you might want to stick a message on the package saying hey, this version has a serious bug, please use the next version up instead! This would be useful; maybe a feature for Hackage 2? ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Edit Hackage
On 29 October 2010 07:53, Daniel Fischer daniel.is.fisc...@web.de wrote: On Thursday 28 October 2010 22:44:04, Stephen Tetley wrote: On 28 October 2010 20:59, Don Stewart d...@galois.com wrote: Status of Infrastructure questions like this are best asked on the Haskell Reddit. [SNIP] P.S. I encourage people to use the online forums: Haskell Reddit and Stack Overflow, as a lot of the question-answering activity has shifted there now, away from -cafe@ Err, Why? Having to track three places for information rather than one doesn't seem like a good swap to me... + 1 +1; I see no need to sign up for a reddit account to ask a question there, etc. (and the few times I tried to use my OpenID account to answer questions on StackOverflow I couldn't quite work out what some of the options meant, etc.) IIUC, [one of] the prime motivating factor[s] behind both reddit and StackOverflow is the accumulation of karma, which leads to people posting just to try and accumulate karma even if they don't know what they're talking about. Here, we are (hopefully) above such mundane things. Another point against reddit: Don posted a link to my survey on the naming of fgl a few months back. Someone then queried [1] the two naming choices that were available on reddit rather than reading the discussions that had already taken place here on -cafe or bothering to actually ask _me_. Similar things go with submitted blog posts: rather than discussing the content as comments on the blog post, they discuss them on reddit thus depriving readers of the post itself of what they think. [1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/cp50y/should_the_new_graph_library_be_called_fgl_or/c0u6b6n -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
