EEF Working Group Proposal: Libraries and Frameworks Working Group

libraries_and_frameworks.md

Libraries and Frameworks Working Group

Mission Statement

• To provide resources for library and framework authors to ensure that BEAM languages have a rich, vibrant ecosystem with a high degree of developer experience. Main Objectives
• Provide and maintain best practices on library and framework standardization, documentation, code, and distribution. Collaborate to work on and make proposals for underlying tooling that improve the experience for library/framework authors and users.
• Provide more visibility into the library ecosystem of Elixir on behalf of both authors and users.
• (if Build and Packaging want to move this here, we could also take this over) Improve the user experience in generating and accessing documentation from the shell, IDEs, web pages, and more.

Benefits to the community

• Better, more consistent, and fun-to-use libraries and frameworks for all developers. A rich package ecosystem is essential for any programming ecosystem to thrive.
• Resources for library authors to work together to improve their workflows, allow them to serve their users better, and push for essential changes in the underlying tooling.

Short-term deliverables

• Efforts to improve the story around documenting, maintaining, and releasing multi-package libraries.
• Review the documentation of the best practices and ways people discover libraries and frameworks today.
• Build a shared knowledge base of the issues that library and framework authors face today and how they overcome them.

Long-term deliverables

• Ensure that library and framework authors have the tools to create and maintain these packages.
• Act as an ongoing resource for them to make proposals and discover solutions to problems unique to library and framework authors.
• Maintain the documentation and other resources relevant to library and framework authors.

Why does this group require the Foundation

The amount of libraries and frameworks is growing and will continue to grow. Authors of such remain a relatively small group compared to the ecosystem's end users, and their voices can quickly go unheard in the noise. However, authors need support for the future of our ecosystem. The awareness brought by this WG can help us communicate with underlying tooling maintainers (like language authors/BEAM) more clearly, with shared knowledge supporting us.

Some of the short and long-term outputs of this working group will include improvements to things like hex, proposals, and potentially subsequent implementations of those proposals to underlying tooling. Some of these may be very involved and take considerable time, effort, and coordination. The potential to provide funding to these projects (given enough support) can make a huge difference and show the people investing their time into growing this community that their efforts are supported.

Initial list of volunteers

• Zach Daniel (Ash)
• Yordis Prieto (Ueberauth, Tesla)
• Michael Crumm (Briefly)
• Adriano Santos
• Wout De Puysseleir
• Noah Betzen
• Tiago Moraes
• Mykolas Mankevicius
• Abhishek Tripathi
• Theo Harris
• Barnabas Jovanovics

"Efforts to improve the story around documenting, maintaining and releasing multi-package libraries."

From users perspective, finding right version of everything that works is easy to get mixed up.

Thanks for keeping it in the proposal.

cc @kianmeng

Hello @zachdaniel. I can participate as a volunteer. My name is Adriano Santos

Hi @zachdaniel, nice initiative! Not sure I have input on this at the moment but interested in volunteering and seeing where this goes 👍

I volunteer!

I volunteer too!

Awesome :) I think we're getting close to a point of submitting this proposal. Anyone here with feedback on the wording, feel free to start some discussion.

Anyone here with feedback on the wording, feel free to start some discussion.

I made some minor grammar/phrasing edits, but the overall wording is good: https://gist.github.com/Nezteb/2ba9ce5ca294883b0e46234616371e0c

Added :)

Can i volunteer? I don't have any libs but maybe helping out where i can?

Of course, adding you to the list :)

+1 for volunteering! add me too. :)

I'd like to offer a hand where I can, as I want to be more involved in the Elixir open-source community in general. I'm probably most useful around documentation but happy to do what I can to help 😊

Alright everyone! I think this proposal is in a good place, so I'll be submitting it shortly. Thanks for all of the volunteers! If this gets approved (and likely even if not, we'll still move forward in some way), the next step will be for me to send out some questions to the group to get things started, and we'll go from there! These kinds of things take time, so slow and steady wins the race!

Not sure how much time I can actually commit, but I would still like to help.

Hey everyone! Could all volunteers please sign up for an erlang ecosystem foundation account? You can sign up for a basic account, no need to sign up for paid accounts.

@mcrumm
@sleipnir
@woutdp
@Nezteb
@tiagoefmoraes
@Neophen
@TwistingTwists
@Theosaurus-Rex
@barnabasJ

Once you sign up for an account, please access the slack channel, and join the #libs-and-frameworks channel. Once you're there let us know so we can add you to the working group. Once we've got most of us joined, I'll send out an initial communication and we can get the ball rolling :)

It's here https://members.erlef.org/join-us right?

Yep! Sorry, should have included that link. Thanks!

Joined slack.

which slack channel? Elixir or Erlang

It’s in the erlang ecosystem foundation slack. Once you sign up you can get access to their slack. Then the channel is “libs-and-frameworks”

which slack channel? Elixir or Erlang

You can request the invite here: https://erlef.org/slack-invite/erlef

Hey everyone! Please check out the github discussions page, where will be doing our public conversations. We still have a slack from for day to day, but this will allow visibility to everyone of what we're discussing and working on. erlef/libs-and-frameworks#1

Please watch that repository to be notified of new activity :)