Very interesting line of thought, which prompt three questions for me:
1. Why wouldn’t the purist camp fork GHC? Who decides which “side” forks “off”?
2. Why doesn’t the US just split into two countries? One republican and one democrat governed?
3. I believe there are today GHC developers literally driving on the left side of the road and others who drive on the right side of the road; even among the core GHC maintainers. There are even some who occasionally drive on the left and other times on the right. Why hasn’t GHC forked yet? What about the third group?
The whole debate is trying to find common ground within a diverse group holding different opinions and beliefs. Something open source has been about (to me!) for a long time: people with different beliefs/orientations/associations/preferences congregating around a shared interest.
There have been forks around belief systems (systemd), and there have been fierce discussions around other topics: vim/emacs, linux/macos/windows, permissive/copyleft.
I personally do not think a fork is helpful. And I say that as someone who has forked ghc at
stable-haskell.org. But the intention is to just explore more radical ideas and eventually upstream what sticks, not start a new lineage.
We are a comparatively small community, and I (foolishly?) still believe there is a lot more that unifies us than divides us.
Apologies for barging in.
On some roads people drive in the left lane, on other roads people drive on the right. It helps though to clarify, which rules apply on each road. Middle of the road drivers take risks and endanger other drivers.
Is there any particular reason why the bleeding edge camp, would not fork the GHC repo and go wild, no holds barred ?
Or even do a number of repos, each starting with a clean slate ?
This would make it a fairly clean experiment. It should be possible to compare the outcome.
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