Geoffrey Mainland
That's part of "minimal maintenance mode." Yes, keeping DPH will impose some burden. I am not pretending that keeping DPH imposes no cost, but instead asking what cost we are willing to pay to keep DPH working---maybe the answer is "none."
I would imagine that cost is greater than "none". Unfortunately, it is is very difficult to judge as it depends upon something none of us can know: what the future holds in store for DPH. Naturally, this is subject to the whims of funding and students' interests, but it would be good to know where the DPH project currently stands and what future plans for it, if any, exist. Is there potential for someone to come along in, say, the next three years, pick up the existing implementation, and begin turning it into something that might become useful to a larger audience? I stress the phrase "existing implementation" since we need to weigh the fact that, as has been mentioned in past discussions [1], the current implementation embodies some design decisions which will likely need to be changed, perhaps requiring a rewrite. If a rewrite is very likely it becomes harder for us to ask developers to invest the effort to keep this code building. I also stress the phrase "begin turning", acknowledging that this is a research project, that students and funding come and go, and the problem that the project attacks is a challenging one. I appreciate the fact that DPH may serve as a good smoke-test for GHC and it would be a shame to see this work rot into oblivion; as a Haskell user I am intrigued by the potential held by DPH. Nevertheless, it would be nice to have an estimate of the probability that the effort we put in maintaining DPH might some day be rewarded. Cheers, - Ben [1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.ghc.devel/5645/