Re: [Haskell-cafe] Please check your dependencies on fgl

ivan.miljenovic:

Oh, great, the email _did_ go out on the mailing lists (what with haskell.org being down I wasn't sure it would).

Don Stewart writes:

...

ivan.miljenovic:

...

Thomas Bereknyei are currently re-writing fgl (just about completely from scratch) and we plan to make an initial release to get feedback on the API in the next few weeks.

However, I'm sending this email out now to warn people that I highly doubt any code that was written for the current version of fgl (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/fgl-5.4.2.2) will work with the new version.

How about you give the library a different name then -- so as not to break all those programs?

A complete rewrite with a new maintainer: fgl-awesome

We considered giving it a new name (fgl', etc.) but figured that in the long term this wouldn't be advantagous. We feel that the situation is analogous to QuickCheck: when the new version came out most people kept using the old one until slowly the momentum shifted and more people started using the new version (without checking in depth, Roel's Hackage mirror reports QC-2.x now has 153 reverse dependencies as opposed to 127 reverse dependencies for QC-1.y).

Just remember: you are now the maintainer of a package in the Haskell Platform, and that has some burden on ensuring stability and safety. API-breaking changes are fine, as long as well planned, and it may be up to 12 months before the HP can adopt an API changing release of a package.