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. So I hereby suggest that we make a recompile of Hackage a requirement for any breaking language changes. I understand that it might not be that easy to recompile all of Hackage at the moment so we should try to come up with some step-by-step instructions on how to do it. In the future it would be nice to have a little script that does it and spits out some statistics.

Cheers,

Johan