There is another aspect to this:  How do you get maintainers to apply the patches?  How should hackage be changed to accomodate large-scale refactorings?

There was a discussion on this mailing list related to build regressions on GHC 7.6 last year. 

All of the regressions could be fixed using perl regexps, and it was only a few hours of work, much less than the work involved in the discussion itself.  I downloaded all of hackage and did the fixes using perl.

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2012-August/103155.html

However, without the community infrastructure to actually apply the patches, the problem is not solved.

I think this is mainly a community/organizational issue.  Refactoring is not really the problem, but of course better refactoring abilities are good.

Alexander


On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Niklas Hambüchen <mail@nh2.me> wrote:
Hello Malcolm,

no, I had indeed not seen this! Thanks for the link.

It goes very much in the direction I was thinking of, but it does not
seem to maintained and does not cabal install either.

It also seems very much focused on interactive editor integration as
compared to written-out transformations.

Do you know to what extent they have built and a modification-friendly AST?
Also, do you know if the people involved in this are still active in the
community and interested in working further in this direction?

Thanks
Niklas

On 29/04/13 15:36, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>
> On 29 Apr 2013, at 07:00, Niklas Hambüchen wrote:
>
>> I would like to propose the development of source code refactoring tool
>> that operates on Haskell source code ASTs and lets you formulate rewrite
>> rules written in Haskell.
>
>
> Seen this?
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HaRe
>
> Regards,
>     Malcolm
>

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