On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Adrian May <adrian.alexander.may@gmail.com> wrote:
I think you're missing the point of the platform! 

I suppose I did miss the point of the platform: I was trying to build it, which requires at least part of the

Having to build it already indicates that something is wrong, unless you're porting to an unsupported OS/hardware.
 
platform. As I say, the reason I was trying to build it was that I wrongly blamed the ubuntu package for

That said, may I point out that the Ubuntu packages *are* broken? They shipped a mangled Platform which can't be relied on for much; instead of a well-tested set of packages, they took a good Platform and replaced bits with minimal testing. Yes, this has actually caused problems for people.

Yes there are times when something has to change. I acknowledged that in my original post. But I see no evidence whatsoever that anybody in control of Haskell is holding fire even on things as innocent as getPackageId or as ubiquitous as the prelude. I'm not asking for the opposite extreme of conservatism, just a bit of common sense instead of this bloodbath. 

You're assuming here that someone deliberately targeted your favorite pet. I don't know the details but I VERY STRONGLY doubt anyone said "oh, we should break that function". But I ALSO find it likely that it was the victim of something sufficiently pervasive that the options were "break it" or "live with something else being broken forever, just like Perl vs. cpanel!"

This, sadly, is the real world. The holy grail of fixing bugs without breaking any program ever anywhere is impossible, and even "fix this bug without breaking many other programs" is extremely unlikely. Your choices are this, or Perl/PHP "we do not dare fix bugs or misdesigns because someone's pet program will die".

(Other examples of this:

- Python 3. Note how many existing Python packages still require Python 2.
- The C and C++ standards are increasingly Byzantine due in large part to backward compatibility issues; but I'm guessing from your complaints that this is your ideal model because "old programs still work". Lucky you, you can happily pretend that it's because they have found some magical way to do the fundamentally impossible --- right up until reality bites back.
)

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