Michael Snoyman wrote:
Sorry to confuse this thread with a second Michael.
1) there's a very good use case that's currently excluded by the API, and (2) Michael Sloan figured out some great ways to minimize the breakage. You could even argue that this proposal has *no* API breakage.
Perhaps I missed it, but wouldn't this create major breakage across hackage for 7.8 and before? We will certainly be using 7.8 for years to come, at least for older versions of our products that we must continue to support. In fact, we are only now able to reduce our use of 7.6 to a fairly low (but non-zero) level. This cycle will likely be even longer than usual for the 7.10 upgrade due to the inclusion of the FTP breaking changes which make upgrading much more difficult. I certainly hope that most of the ecosystem will continue to support GHC versions going back at least one or two major versions, as it always has in the past. All that said, I am in favor of this change - it is a great design. But I would strongly oppose doing it immediately unless there is some plan to allow continued support of recent pre-7.10 GHC versions in the ecosystem. Thanks, Yitz ("you can call me Michael")