[Haskell-cafe] Heads up: planned removal of String instances from HTTP package

Hi, tl;dr: I'm planning on removing the String instances from the HTTP package. This is likely to break code. Obviously it will involve a major version bump. The basic reason is that this instance is rather broken in itself. A String ought to represent Unicode data, but the HTTP wire format is bytes, and HTTP makes no attempt to handle encoding. This was discussed on the libraries@ list a while back, but I'm happy to discuss further if there's a general feeling that this is a bad thing to do: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2012-September/018426.html I will probably upload the new version in a week or two. Cheers, Ganesh