Based on repeated recent experience, I expect getting rid of Rank2Types to be another substantial source of make-work for library authors. The GHC upgrade path has been very bumpy indeed recently, and this seems assured to continue that unhappy trend. I respectfully request that you silently retain Rank2Types as a synonym for RankNTypes.
Do you mean “silently and forever”? Deprecation simply means that everything continues to work, but you get a little nudge to change. Isn’t that what it’s for? If you treat deprecation as equivalent to error, then there isn’t much point in having it.
It’s possible that making Rank2Types = RankNTypes silently and forever is the right answer. It just doesn’t feel right to me. But I’m not a library author and I don’t feel terribly strongly.
Simon
From: Bryan O'Sullivan [mailto:bos@serpentine.com]
Sent: 22 October 2012 17:06
To: Simon Peyton-Jones
Cc: johan.tibell@gmail.com; Don Stewart; Duncan Coutts; Roman Leshchinskiy; ashley@semantic.org; cabal-devel@haskell.org; Ben Lippmeier; Manuel M T Chakravarty; cvs-ghc@haskell.org
Subject: Re: deprecating
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 11:49 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones