Re: Whither split base?

FWIW, I'm very much in favour of Ed's suggestion. A monolithic base creates too much friction for things like porting or introducing newcomers like myself to making contributions to base. I am however interested in why they believe introducing backpack to base should cause breaking changes. Discussions there, I believe would be illuminating. Cheers John On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 at 03:01, Tom Murphy wrote:

I'd rather see Backpack become a lot more mainstream (many more packages using it, maybe seeing other Haskell compilers implement it?) before using it to split base.

I'm also -1 on any change to our most foundational package that causes breakage for any category of users, unless there's a very compelling reason.

Tom

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Now that we have backpack which gives us 'reexported-modules:' perhaps a better plan for a split-base would be rather to leave base monolithic, with its current API, but instead eyeball having it re-export most if not all of itself from smaller split-base components?

I'm mostly interested in foundational wins where splitting things up enables us to run in more places because you have to port fewer parts, and less about wins that we get from splintering off small but completely

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haskell components like the 'printf', but I can well understand how these concerns get conflated.

Then Herbert's (valid) objection about needless breakage is addressed and it still provides a roadmap to a finer-grained dependency set nonetheless.

-Edward

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 11:32 AM Daniel Cartwright < chessai1996@gmail.com> wrote:

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DOA seems kinda harsh at this point. If base just re-exports the stuff, that makes sense, but wouldn't we want to move it out eventually?

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018, 11:29 AM Carter Schonwald < carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

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Yeah

The point ofnsplit base as an idea or goal is to make base simply reexport stuff. Not to drop it off the base/face of the earth.

This proposal is DOA.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 11:03 AM Vanessa McHale < vanessa.mchale@iohk.io> wrote:

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Saying "people shouldn't be using this API in library code" seems like a poor reason to potentially break (working?) packages downstream. On 10/30/18 7:42 AM, Andrew Martin wrote:

The benefit is certainly small, and it probably would discourage using the API. I don't think that the migration path would be tricky. The new package would just reexport Text.Printf when built with base < 4.13, and it would define it when built with base >= 4.13. All that is required is a build-depends line. However, people really shouldn't be using this API in library code. Other modules in base provide more efficient and more type-safe ways handle most of the situations I've seen this used for.

I've never used System.Console.GetOpt (I'm typically use optparse-applicative for option parsing), but yes, I think that would also be a good candidate. Since there are multiple competing approach for argument parsing in the haskell ecosystem, my preference would be to avoid blessing any of them with inclusion in base.

I don't feel particularly strongly about either of these, but their position in base feels odd. They both feel like the result of applying a "batteries included" mindset to a standard library that has by and large refrained from including batteries.

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 8:17 AM Herbert Valerio Riedel < hvriedel@gmail.com> wrote:

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On 2018-10-30 at 08:04:59 -0400, Andrew Martin wrote: > Here's an idea for this I had last night. It's narrowly scoped, but > I think > it moves us a tiny bit in the right direction. We could move Text.Printf > out of base and into its own library. This doesn't really belong in base. > The interface it provides it somewhat opinionated, and it's not

even

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> type-safe. The new library could be named `printf` and could live under the > haskell github organization. Any thoughts for or against?

Ok, but what does this effectively achieve?

Text.Printf is an API that has been extremely stable and doesn't significant evolve anymore; I don't think it has contributed to major ver bumps in recent times, nor is it likely to. So I don't see much of a compelling benefit in doing so. The effect I'd expect if we do this is that `Text.Printf` will be reached for less (which some might argue to be a desirable effect -- but you're effectively pushing this API to a path of slow legacy death due to reduced discoverability, IMO), as

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convenience of using it is reduced by requiring adding and

On 10/30/18, Edward Kmett wrote: pure the maintaining

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an additional `build-depends` line to your package descriptions, as well as having to deal with the subtly tricky business of handling the migration path pre/post-split (c.f. the `network-bsd` split currently being in progress).

Btw, a related extremely stable API in base I could think of which people might argue doesn't belong into `base` either is maybe `System.Console.GetOpt`; would you argue to split that off as well? _______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries

-- -Andrew Thaddeus Martin

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