Re: [Haskell-cafe] Recompiling Hackage to estimate the impact of a change [Was: StricterLabelledFieldSyntax]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 08:21:00AM +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:

On Sun, Jul 26, 2009 at 3:34 AM, Ian Lynagh wrote:

...

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/StricterLabelledFieldSynt...

In general, I think it would be a good idea to provide some statistics of how many packages would break as the result of a backwards incompatible change. Without that data I find it hard to do a cost-benefit analysis.

To some extent you are right, and if we had an easy to to get those stats when I would be in favour of doing so. But it is important to remember that a count of packages that break won't tell you how hard it would be to fix them. For example, the complete diff needed to fix old-time for StricterLabelledFieldSyntax was: - toClockTime cal{ctMonth=month', ctYear=year'} + toClockTime $ cal{ctMonth=month', ctYear=year'} Thanks Ian