Hi everyone,
I feel extremely sad about this discussion for multiple reasons. But regarding the technical agenda:
> I'm going to look at `toml-parser` in the meantime, but no toml library does what I have in mind (namely a full fledged implementation of the spec, streaming, deriving etc.), nor do many of them provide bidirectional serialization save `tomland`.
This does sound very disappointing to me and I don't fully understand the needs. Because:
* tomland is the official TOML parsing library in Haskell according to the
TOML spec wiki* tomland fully supports the spec version 0.5.0, and the latest spec 1.0.0 was published relatively recently. And to my knowledge, it is the only Haskell library that supports the latest spec.
* tomland is based on explicit values, but nevertheless it provides deriving via Generics
I feel very confused about this situation. And again I feel like people the Haskell committees members are not willing to recognise other's people work and would rather rewrite everything from scratch instead of collaborating with existing projects created by people outside of committees. Even outside the Haskell community (the TOML org), tomland was acknowledged as the official TOML library, but not in the Haskell community itself.
At least, the following steps could be taken first:
* Why not open issues to tomland (or other libraries) and discuss the features you want? We maintain tomland for multiple years. The latest release was Feb 12 2021 (a month ago!). We constantly improve the implementation, fix parsing issues, improve interface and error-handling. Attempting to rewrite all this from scratch instead of collaborating with existing maintainers feels very unfriendly.
* If you want to have the official TOML parsing library under the `toml` namespace on Hackage, again, why not ask the maintainers if they consider moving the library? And only after this discussion act accordingly.
* If you are concerned about the lack of people working on the `tomland` library (which I don't fully understand, because in Kowainik we always have at least two people maintaining packages), then why not ask to add as a maintainer, instead of rewriting another library? Or even ask to move to the official `haskell` organization on GitHub, if you want to have more people maintaining the official package.
I mean, how am I supposed to feel motivated working on Haskell open-source projects, if my work can be just discarded at any time, the official library will be appointed without even communicating this desire? If I weren't subscribed to this thread, I probably wouldn't even know that something is going behind backs. We've put a lot of effort into tomland. We literally spent years of maintenance, UX improvements, bug fixes, writing tutorials and blog posts about the library and its implementation. And it is still not enough just to be respected and even give the chance to reply to the users needs?
That sounds very concerning to me. I don' feel like Haskell tech can move forward if people's (specifically if they are not associated with any Haskell leaders) work is disrespected.
Best regards,
Dmitrii