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Idris Project Meta Discussion April May 2014

Jan de Muijnck-Hughes edited this page May 16, 2014 · 3 revisions

During the April/May 2014 Developers Meeting, a meta discussion was held to discuss various community related items. The minutes are given below.

Distribution of Maintenance Work

Currently maintenance of the project is handled by a single maintainer (@edwinb) the aim of this discussion is to figure how @edwinb's workload can be reduced.

Pull requests

To increase the through-put of pull requests to idris-dev, commit rights are to be given to: @david-christiansen and @raichoo.

General best practise for managing PRs: Each developer who has commit rights will be responsible for areas of Idris they are knowledgeable in. If a developer with commit rights has concerns over a pull request they shall defer to @edwinb.

idris-lang Web Updates

Currently, Edwin Brady is the admin for idris-lang.org. To address issues of web-site maintenance, both @david-christiansen and @raichoo have been given admin access.

Adding to Idris's prelude and default library

Developers seeking to add content to Idris's prelude and default library, should do so through a PR. It should be noted that developers should be prepared to wait until their PR has been discussed and authorized prior to the PR's inclusion.

Of note, major changes to the library should ideally be discussed first in the pull request, or through the projects official channels of communication i.e. the mailing list, github wiki, or IRC.

Idris-dev's Contribs Folder

contribs on idris-dev is to be separated away from the main project and placed in a separate repository named: idris-contrib.

Release Patterns

It was decided to leverage the release milestones and issues features on GitHub to track the status of the project for release.

There is an ad hoc backwards compatibility checking script used to construct/check releases that will be added to the list of milestones. This script should be polished and made publishable. It was also agreed upon that there should be more general documentation relating to how releases are done

As part of the release updated versions of idris-doc generated HTML documentation for the prelude and default library should be made available.

How to handle Interest from Industry.

Industry is to be reminded that Idris is primarily a research tool, and is not necessarily production ready. Reminders shall take the form of:

  1. A statement on the landing page of idris-lang.org.
  2. A statement in the banner for the Idris REPL.

A decision was made to deprecate the Idris Hackers GitHub IO page, in favour of using idris-lang.org to highlight projects.

When Idris 1.0?

In short 'Never'.

The use of a Version 1.0 implies that Idris is production ready, it is primarily a research project and may never satisfy the implications associated with a 1.0 release. However, it was agreed that notions associated with 'releases' are good. The developers involved in the discussion agreed that the use of a year.day.number format would better suit the project and still fit in with cabal's version number requirements.

Light Continuous Integration Testing.

@edwinb has currently a shell script to determine backwards compatibility issues by pulling from named projects. It was agreed that this would be of benefit for testing Idris locally and included in the current CI tests.

Resolve names of double and floats?

There has been prior discussion over this topic. A FAQ question should be added.

IRC

Prior to this discussion no formal policy was written concerning use of the IRC channel. Several policies were agree upon and are documented here.

Abusive members

It was decided that if IRC members are being abusive they can be booted from the channel.

Support Calls

If an IRC member is constantly asking for help and you have no time, it is okay to tell them you have no time.

Communicating results of discussion

Discussions concerning Idris currently take place in: the mailing list, over IRC, on the wiki, and in person. We officially encourage the use of the mailing list, but allow all forms of discussion. In the case than an IRC conversation provides interesting results then the discussion can be scraped and place on the wiki IFF permission has been obtained from the participants.

@david-christiansen was going to add an to the IRC FAQ on scraping.

Release Tagging of Supported Projects.

There was a request to tag related projects in accordance to the version of Idris that they work with.

Documentation

Concerning documentation related to Idris

Interactive Features

It was suggested that a short 2--3 page document be created that maps interactive editing commands from emacs to vim and the REPL.

Planet Idris

It was suggested that more tutorials be added to idris-lang.org. This approach would potentially be cumbersome, and it would be better to collate blog postings. The issue of creating a blog planet for Idris was then raised to provide a central location for collecting blog posts involving Idris. People agreed that this is a good idea.

Idris The Book

The language is too young for a book to be developed.

Idris The Tutorial as Markdown

There is ongoing work to convert the existing Idris tutorial to markdown to facilitate easy generation of both HTML and LaTeX versions of the work.

Idris Screencasts

Given the success of recent screencasts demonstrating Idris, it would be a good idea to produce more highlighting various aspects of the language.

Comparisons to Agda

@raichoo mentioned interest in the creation of a document that looks at using Idris in comparison to Agda.

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