HF Board Meeting Minutes, 2022-10-06

[david-christiansen]

Here’s the minutes for the Haskell Foundation board meeting yesterday, 6 October 2022: https://gitlab.haskell.org/hf/minutes/-/raw/main/board/2022-10-06_Agenda__Minutes.md

[f-a]

Ouch @ getting covid! Thanks so much for these minutes, it is great to see what the HF is up to.

Trouble installing toolchain on student computers is one of the big problems identified so far

This is distressing.

[david-christiansen]

I agree! My initial strategy to address it is to develop and maintain a standardized “here’s how you set up Haskell for education in year X” that multiple universities can point at, or perhaps one recommendation for local work and one for VM/cloud/etc work that the instructor can choose.

Part of the problem is that instructions and guides bitrot much more quickly than a curriculum or textbook, so hopefully centralizing the maintenance in an organization that has access to lots of Haskell experts will be an affordable way to combat that.

[f-a]

Do we know what is their user story? Do they install it via stack? ghcup?

[david-christiansen]

There’s no single thing recommended at all universities. Part of what I want to do is help bring out a common set of instructions that we can iterate on, suitably customized for classroom use.

[santiweight]

Can we develop a CI for installing Haskell on different OSes that runs nightly? It would start up an instance of each OS of interest, run the suggested installation steps, and print hello world.

Seems like that would avoid a lot of headaches!

[atravers]

@f-a

Trouble installing toolchain on student computers is one of the big problems identified so far

This is distressing.

Me:

[…]

As it is now, the Haskell ecosystem has a curious resemblance to an OS distribution (GNU+Linux, BSD, GNU+BSD kernel, etc) - apart from the obvious absence of boot sectors, device drivers and other OS staples, there’s only one version (which could be called torment).

If I’ve used an OS distro with such an arrangement, I have completely forgotten it. I can only recall using ones with at least two versions:

• current (stable for regular use)
• future (testing for new features, etc.)

and people can then choose what’s best for their needs.

Whether or not the Haskell ecosystem could ever have a similar arrangement is a question I leave for those much more knowledgable on these matters…

---

@santiweight

Can we develop a CI for installing Haskell on different OSes that runs nightly? It would start up an instance of each OS of interest, run the suggested installation steps, and print hello world.

• the suggested installation steps for each OS, or one unified list of instructions?

• for which version/s of GHC, Cabal, Stack, et al? The level of support for GHC and its dependencies varies between OSs…

[santiweight]

It’d be whatever instructions are recommended for each OS by the website.

• for which version/s of GHC, Cabal, Stack, et al? The level of support for GHC and its dependencies varies between OSs…

Seems like a future question? We haven’t decided whether it should be done for the obvious OS and GHC/cabal combos…

[atravers]

@santiweight

[…] We haven’t decided whether it should be done for the obvious OS and GHC/cabal combos…

How about just one combination of GHC, Cabal, Stack, Hackage, Stackage, etc “per release cycle” - educators, maintainers and commercial users then only have to worry about how to get this circus flying it working on their respective OSs…

[hasufell]

@santiweight

Can we develop a CI for installing Haskell on different OSes that runs nightly?

Pipeline · Haskell / ghcup-hs · GitLab

This is not a nightly, but trivial to do.

There’s also ghcup-metadata/bindists.yaml at develop · haskell/ghcup-metadata · GitHub which is probably more like that. That can also easily be turned into a nightly job.

[santiweight]

Obviously one is better than nothing… I think right now it would help to just wait for others to point out the relevant resources. We don’t need to discuss details until it is clear we would like to execute

[ChShersh]

It would be useful to connect students to projects that are relatively easy to contribute to that have community mentors, somewhat like GSoC

As a GSoC mentor in the past, I can say that I had great success mentoring students on industrial-strength projects with databases, CI/CD and tagless final approaches. It’s not that difficult but it does require time, dedication and some teaching skills.

I’m currently mentoring newcomers in my Haskell Beginners 2022 course and in Iris — a Haskell CLI framework. In Iris, I create multiple beginner-friendly issues specifically for people to start contributing to the Haskell ecosystem and learn language best practices. So they can learn OSS, various Haskell topics and improve the ecosystem at the same time.

Although I must admit, it’s Hacktoberfest and I’m quite overwhelmed by the amount of work It might not be difficult if you have proper skills but it’s still lots of unpaid work.

[david-christiansen]

Thanks for sharing your experience and project!