On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 3:23 AM, Sven Panne
Can we please have a page on https://wiki.haskell.org/ describing the proposal (including its detailed semantics), the various counter-proposals (2? 3? I lost track to be honest), the various concerns/issues/..., pros/cons etc. ? Email threads are very bad for longer-running discussions, and even the trac ticket has already degenerated a bit into an email thread. I think by now it's very clear that more detailed discussion is needed, just counting some +1 and -1 doesn't lead us anywhere. (Language design by voting is often a terrible idea, BTW, this has been demonstrated by history many times...)
The original email I sent was not a design by committee, but a PSA because when I started implementing this, I discovered that the parts of GHC dealing with imports are in rather poor shape. The work needed to shore that up touches half a dozen or so files, and I did not want to finish the work to have the patch languish. Enough popular support might have opened that door. The PSA was greeted by authors writing strongly worded rebuttals substantially longer than the four sentence proposal they obviously did not read. It received disdainful mockery based on a proprietary code base owned by a company which itself is in the process of adding new syntax that does not let us do anything we cannot do now. We were told about how cabal works as a prelude to a quiet feature request to actually make cabal work the way it was stated to work. I simply do not have the desire to navigate that kind of cognitive dissonance for a nights and weekends project, so I'm withdrawing the proposal. If someone else wishes to continue via Wiki or otherwise, that would be great. Anthony