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
