I empathise with what you're saying, John, but I think it will fall upon deaf ears unless the community agrees that your points support one of the goals of the Haskell libraries project. I wrote some notes on formal consensus for free software projects a while ago ( http://bobstopper.livejournal.com/22939.html ) and I think one of my points is applicable here: without codified community principles, it's difficult to identify what is and isn't relevant discussion for the project. Clearly you consider the discussion relevent while many others don't. I think your points would carry much more weight if you didn't have to argue your case every time you raised them. For this, having a set of principles which the community adheres to would be a boon: it could clearly articulate whether the community as a whole is ultimately concerned with the proliferation of names for small functions thus ensuring that such proposals in future are judged in a consistent way without the need for superfluous discussion. I'd suggest this community write up a simple set of principles with measures to allow future proposals to ammend the principles. Start with the smaller, more obvious principles and later move to add principles that deal with the issues such as Jon is raising. On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 18:52 +0000, Jon Fairbairn wrote:
I simply don't have the stamina to follow up to all the objections to my messages. I'm posting this here in the thread because it's a convenient point, not because Robert's message troubles me particularly.
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Robert Marlow