We started work on the Foldable/Traversable issue during 7.8, right after the BBP process burned down and it was clear there was a strong desire to see motion on that topic, and the core libraries committee was formed, but decided not to act on anything during 7.8, as 7.8's release seemed immanent at the time. Little did we know it'd drag on for another 7 months. Overall, that proved to be a good thing, as we spent much of that time trying to understand how to retie the Gordian knot that is the set of hs boot files that makes up base.
But there is definitely a process concern. We've now had proposals that 'passed' a year ago or six months ago, that we're able now to implement, now that we finally have folks in place that know how to work through the existing process.
Most of these are small fixes, broadly agreed upon. Do we make someone who already jumped through all the hoops to get a coherent proposal through the process run and jump through them all again?
Once 7.10 started we set to work in earnest. A large part of the committee work that has happened in 7.10 has been un-log-jamming issues that have been stuck in trac on the libraries@ process with or without a patch. Some of the bugs that had made it into trac had languished for years.
Most of the complications in the current design came about because of things that only became obvious once the framework was in place.
I do agree that it is quite difficult to keep abreast of all that is happening in GHC.
Part of that is a consequence of having an order of magnitude more cooks in the kitchen these days. At the same time you have core libraries work going on, we have a bunch of independent work going on on the front of how to deal with SIMD instructions, swizzling, folks who care deeply about the fate of DPH, a ton of exciting work on the cabal side that centers around how to deal with finally solving 'cabal hell', complications induced by considering the impact of Kilpatrick and Yang's work on Backpack, work on the RTS and garbage collector, etc.
There are a lot more people active now. There were something like 40+ people actively contributing code at the beginning of last year, and that number can only have grown since. When it was just the two Simons and whatever couple of graduate students happened to stumble in, things proceeded at a much more gentle pace. But with Simon Marlow moving on to facebook, a lot of folks decided to pitch in to pick up the slack. It is easy to keep track of the head-space of a smaller pool of contributors.
A whole new toolchain has been built up around using phabricator for code review that has greatly improved the quality of the patches going into GHC. This has helped a great deal, but if you think the libraries@ process is hard to keep up with, well, there have been several hundred phabricator patch reviews since the process started last year, mostly dealing with the minutiae of how to integrate pre-existing trac tickets raised by libraries@ proposals or flat out ghc bug reports. ;)
We absolutely do need to work out more effective ways to communicate what is going on.
There will be growing pains, there will be surprises, but we are all pulling towards a common goal, that of making GHC be the best compiler it can be for Haskell, and making continuing to strive towards making Haskell be the best version of itself that it can be.
-Edward