Task of the HP steering committee

[Duncan Coutts]

members of the HP steering committee,

Thanks all for volunteering. I hope you are all now subscribed to the
haskell platform mailing list. If not please do so:

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at
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We should hold discussion in public on this list.


So as I see it, the immediate task of the steering committee is to help
the community come to decisions on the standards and procedures we will
use when adding new packages to the platform. This is highly relevant
since we do have a major release coming up and the release team need
guidance on what should be in that release. So we have to break down the
issue and work out how best to present individual questions to the
community to get decisions.

I should note one lesson from the time Don and I asked the previous
question about major/minor releases. We initially asked a rather focused
question without much background on the assumptions we were making. The
resulting discussion showed that those background assumptions were vital
and that those were the things we had to discuss to be able to come to a
decision on the specific question of what is in a major vs minor release
and how frequent they should be.

So the top level specific question we have is what procedures to use for
new packages. But behind that is a much of issues about how the
community wants to balance quantity vs quality. The community could go
for slow growth of the platform with very high quality and great review,
or more towards adding lots of packages from hackage that appear to be
useful. This partly depends on whether you think a package has to be in
the platform for it to be useful, or whether it merely has to be
compatible with the platform packages.

So, lets start setting out and discussing how to break down and present
the issues.

Duncan