RE: Haskell libraries, support status, and range of applicability(was:Haskell jobs)
| I do not want to sound too negative. I am always happy about | suggestions for improving haskell.org (especially if they do not imply | too much work ;-). Olaf, I do think that a simple interface to let one add an entry to the page would be well worth while. It puts more control in the hands of the author, and that is good. I think it would make it the page more 'live' and useful. Just an interface that let you type in title select heading (from a list) brief description URL Maybe a way to delete such an entry too. But editing is probably too much. We've found that people become more committed and involved when they have write-permission to the GHC repository. I think the same would happen here. Simon
RE: Haskell libraries, support status, and range of applicability(was:Haskell jobs)
Simon, can you tell me how I shall link to hslibs, especially each individual library? Obviously a user would also like to download a single library. That's not so obvious to me. We're going to the effort of packaging up all these libraries into a single coherent collection, that can be distributed along with compilers, in effect to raise the baseline of libraries that the average Haskell programmer can "assume" are installed. Separating out single libraries isn't practical. There are a great deal of interdependencies. However, the libraries are organised into 7 packages which do have a well-defined dependency tree, so perhaps you could grab a single package at a time. Anyway, we'll try to make sure at least this link stays stable: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/book-hslibs.html Cheers, Simon
Re: Haskell libraries, support status, and range of applicability(was:Haskell jobs)
Olaf Chitil [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The latter is exactly what I do and how 99% of the information about tools and libraries were collected. The main page of haskell.org asks for information about projects, compilers, papers, classes, or anything else but we hardly receive any. This is a common problem: Just putting out a website that tells people what to do will usually not make them do it. This is why I am rather wary about putting much effort into any automatic submission and updating scheme It sort of works for fresmeat.net, and Haskell users seem to be fanatic :-) enough that many will in fact update the information on their libraries while they work on them. With a scheme like this, maintenance status can be inferred easily, just compare the following two freshmeat entries: The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (Development/Compilers) A compiler for Haskell 98 created: Feb 11th 1999, 10:19 last update: July 06th 2000, 12:05 stable: 4.08 - devel: none - license: BSD type and Modular Game Base (Development/Game SDK) Modular Game Development Kit created: May 25th 1999, 08:53 last update: May 25th 1999, 16:57 stable: none - devel: 0.1 - license: GPL It works semi-automatically: any registered user may submit changes, but the actual modification of the data is only done after an editor has checked their accuracy. I do not want to sound too negative. I am always happy about suggestions for improving haskell.org (especially if they do not imply too much work ;-). Regard it as a system to ease your burden of keeping up to date with library changes. Yours, Florian.
Re: Haskell libraries, support status, and range of applicability(was:Haskell jobs)
On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, Claus Reinke wrote: Jan Skibinski: On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, Claus Reinke wrote: [List of some examples of library status information..] Someone asks about GUIs on comp.lang.functional, on the Haskell list, or elsewhere, and we just point them towards the library list at haskell.org - question answered, problem solved, isn't Haskell just nice?-) True. Seeing a last-contact date for a library tells me more: on that date, the authors' plans where these. I always put two dates on my pages for the exact same reason, which you are raising. But doing it on my own web is one thing, and putting extra burden on shoulders of John Peterson and Olaf Chitil is quite another. I would suggest to take the example from xxx.laml.gov and formalize submission process via form interface. As you might have noticed, the LANL e-print server does not accept free-form abstracts, because that used to lead to a mess -- including misspellings of the very word 'abstract'. I have never submitted any request to the maintainers of www.haskell.org to place links to my modules. Yet, several of them are there, and that tells me that either John or Olaf does occasional scan of messages from this list and update the pages from time to time. It is quite a burden to keep everything up to date. The automatic submission process should solve several things: + Put up-to-date status information on the www.haskell.org. + Ease the maintenance process of those pages. For those who do not know how it works on LANL server: + You register yourself as an author and receive password for any future submission of your articles. + During submission of a particular paper your receive another password, which relates to that paper only. Based on this you have a power to correct your paper or even withdraw it. I think that would be a good idea for Haskell (but please, not at the level of comma positions;-). I used to be bitching about that too:-). But I later realized that those little things are also really important for readability of the software. Perhaps haskell.org could give out reference numbers for software? So instead of the haskell.org maintainers searching high and low for existing software, library authors would actually submit their stuff to get a reference number, so that they and their users could refer to the software as published on haskell.org as [HS-LIB-2000-01] or [HS-TOOL-2000-02] or whatever? LANL classification system is simple: quant-ph/0007059 means: Section Quantum Physics, year 00, (2000), month 07, article number 59 received in that month. Once we have references to software (not only to nice publication talking about software), the next step could be some form of software review, perhaps itself published online as "haskell.org - quarterly software review"? I second both of your proposals. Alternatively some sort of reader driven scoring system could be worthwhile to consider - with a power given to authors to withdraw their submissions. Such mechanism exists on LANL server. This is fair to authors. I think, a number of libraries on Haskell pages reached some critical mass and it is about time to think of quality rather than of manifestation of quantity of Haskell applications. Jan
Re: Haskell libraries, support status, and range of applicability(was:Haskell jobs)
I have never submitted any request to the maintainers of www.haskell.org to place links to my modules. Yet, several of them are there, and that tells me that either John or Olaf does occasional scan of messages from this list and update the pages from time to time. The latter is exactly what I do and how 99% of the information about tools and libraries were collected. The main page of haskell.org asks for information about projects, compilers, papers, classes, or anything else but we hardly receive any. This is why I am rather wary about putting much effort into any automatic submission and updating scheme (maybe I should put a simple form there which just forwards any information to John and me via email? ;-). And if you want to know if a library is still supported/further developed, then just click on the link and look at the web page for the library. If it talks about Haskell 1.2 and plans for 1995 you know what (not) to expect. Unfortunately many libraries and tools do not even have proper web pages to link to from haskell.org (Michal Weber, are you listening? ;-). Simon, can you tell me how I shall link to hslibs, especially each individual library? Obviously a user would also like to download a single library. Are the URLs stable? I do not want to sound too negative. I am always happy about suggestions for improving haskell.org (especially if they do not imply too much work ;-). And I completely agree that supported libraries should somehow be more visible. I didn't update haskell.org for a few month because I had to finish my thesis, move to York and start a new project here. But I will update the pages with all the stuff that accumulated in the meantime very soon. Cheers, Olaf -- OLAF CHITIL, Dept. of Computer Science, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. URL: http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/~olaf/ Tel: +44 1904 434756; Fax: +44 1904 432767
