Folks,<div><br></div><div>I&#39;m going to change the naming of functions in the text API to match base within the next few days, but for me this has been a close-run decision: I&#39;ve come very nearly as close to simply asking for the text proposal to be withdrawn. This has been the first time in my many years of participation in the Haskell community of finding the experience thoroughly and persistently unpleasant.</div>

<div><br></div><div>My reason for choosing to change the names is in part a nod of respect to Ian and Ross, whose opinions and contributions I value. I continue to disagree with their conclusion about naming, but I understand their reasoning behind it. I also want to make the volunteering jobs of Duncan, Don, and the other HP folks less onerous, as the success of their work is very important to me, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for their work. I feel a strong sense of obligation to all of these people.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now why, with all that noble sentiment expressed, would I have so strongly considered walking away over such an apparently minor point as the names of a few functions? Put it down to a matter of pride and proportion.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Tom&#39;s original text library was about 1,700 lines in length. When Duncan handed it over to me, it was 2,200. It&#39;s now 12,300 lines long. I also spent three months writing a random number generator, a statistics library, and a benchmarking library in order to ensure the code was fast. And then there are the ICU bindings, for all the extra Unicode work that&#39;s simply too much to reimplement in native Haskell. Together, those libraries amount to an additional 11,300 lines of code.</div>
<div><br></div><div>So. 23,600 lines of code, six BSD-licensed libraries, and months of work later, to be told repeatedly that my taste in function naming for a small portion of the API, no matter how clearly articulated, wasn&#39;t good enough has, well, not sat well with me. Sad to say, it is only by a hair&#39;s breadth that I feel like enough of a bigger man to push ahead. It has at times been difficult not to feel like I&#39;ve laboured mightily over a large gift, only to have it shoved back in my face because the ribbons simply don&#39;t capture quite the right curl.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Now that I&#39;ve gotten that off my chest, I have some specific proposals to fix aspects of the Platform inclusion process that I found most painful. I would be most grateful to see these receive consideration.</div>
<div><br></div><div>To begin with, active participation, moderation, and collation of data is important. The text proposal spawned some huge threads, but I felt that the HP team was largely absent through the many discussions, and after a while I had to simply give up tracking stuff by eyeball. Maybe I missed some things as a result; I don&#39;t know.</div>
<div><ul><li>There must be a place for people to record issues, so we know which ones matter enough to track. Trac would work perfectly well for this. The order of operations should probably be for objectors to record their thoughts there, then for a moderator or the proposer to sort them out after a discussion period. (Obviously, in the case of text, naming looked like the squeaky wheel, but Ian raised a number of issues with bits of the internals, and I&#39;m not sure I caught them all amid the torrent of email. And those were the ones that were actually unequivocally valuable, too!)</li>
<li>A moderator should keep the discussion from wandering too far off track. Things that I&#39;d like to see as off limits would include discussion of whether some third party library needs tweaking, or an attempt to revive a contentious topic of discussion that has been resolved and should stay that way.</li>
<li>An Apache-style vote system for resolving points of disagreement, so that we can move past them reasonably swiftly instead of going in endless morale-sapping circles. This is particularly important to me. I&#39;d really have liked to be able to say &quot;we discussed this, it&#39;s over&quot; about naming, but instead I feel that objectors held, in effect, a veto. The current consensus system seems to require complete agreement from all parties, which seems perverse.</li>
</ul>I am sad to say that I feel somewhat ill done by and upset as a result of this process, and it&#39;s not an experience I would rush to repeat. I wish you the best in improving it.</div>