Hi
The problem with Data for Text isn't that we have to write a new instance, but that you could argue that proper handling of Text with Data would not be using a type class, but have special knowledge baked in to Data. That's far worse than the Serialise problem mentioned above, and no one other than the Data authors could solve it. Of course, I don't believe that, but it is a possible interpretation.
Right.. that is the problem with Text. Do you think the correct thing to do for gunfold and toConstr is to convert the Text to a String and then call the gufold and toConstr for String? Or something else?
No idea sadly - the SYB stuff was never designed to work with abstract structures, or structures containing strict/unboxed components. Converting the Text to a String should work, so in the absence of any better suggestions, that seems reasonable.
The Serialise problem is a serious one. I can't think of any good solutions, but I recommend you give knowledge of your serialise class to Derive (http://community.haskell.org/~ndm/derive/) and then at least the instances can be auto-generated. Writing lots of boilerplate and regularly ripping it up is annoying, setting up something to generate it for you reduces the pain.
We currently use template haskell to generate the Serialize instances in most cases (though some data types have more optimized encodings that were written by hand). However, you must supply the Version and Migration instances by hand (they are super classes of Serialize). I am all for splitting the Serialize stuff out of happstack .. it is not really happstack specific. Though I suspect pulling it out is not entirely trivial either. I think the existing code depends on syb-with-class.
If you switch to Derive then you can generate the classes with Template Haskell, or run the Derive tool as a preprocessor. Derive abstracts over these details, and also tends to be much easier than working within Template Haskell (which I always find surprisingly difficult). Thanks, Neil