Hi Dan, The long term goal is not to revamp the entire API of network, just the high-level interface in the Network module. Currently (actually, for the entire past, like, 5 years I've been using network), the documentation of the Network module has stated: "This module is kept for backwards-compatibility. New users are encouraged to use Network.Socket instead. Network was intended as a "higher-level" interface to networking facilities, and only supports TCP." Why keep around a deprecated high-level interface and recommend people use the low level one. Seems much better (long-term) to overhaul the high-level interface in Network so that it actually becomes recommend over writing code using Network.Socket itself. Cheers, Merijn

On 10 Oct 2017, at 15:51, Dan Burton wrote:

If the long term goal is to completely revamp the api, why not just write a new library?

On Oct 10, 2017 04:29, "Merijn Verstraaten" wrote: Hi hackage admins & libraries@ readers,

So, to the best of my knowledge 'network' is currently maintained by libraries@/the community, which is code for "not maintained". I've previously entertained the thought of taking up maintainership, but so far was held back by the fact that I don't do windows dev experience. I've discussed this in #ghc before and the consensus was that *nix only maintenance is probably still better than no maintenance.

I was inspired to finally write this email and try to take up maintenance after spending all day yesterday tomorrow debugging an issue in my code, only to realise that Network.ByteString.Lazy.getContents will literally *always* crash/throw an exception when used.

My plans are to: Short term: fix obvious errors like getContents, cut through the PR backlog on github to see what can be merged, what needs work, etc.

Medium term: Improve exception/error handling (network specific exception type that people can catch), better (async) exceptions safety guarantees/documentation of safety

Long term: I would like ditch the current (deprecated) high-level interface and replace it with modern high level API.

Now, the biggest problem is that I don't have experience developing on Windows and neither the time nor the motivation to get started with that, so I will need someone to take up co-maintainership of the windows parts (I'll probably send an email about this to -cafe if people are supportive of me taking up maintenance).

Cheers, Merijn

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On 10 Oct 2017, at 16:53, Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

Why keep around a deprecated high-level interface and recommend people use the low level one.

How about a third option: deprecate the old high-level interface, and add a new, better designed high-level interface? That way you keep backwards compatibility for existing code, while allowing a new API to come into existence.

Personally, in these kinds of situations, I usually recommend starting the new API off in a separate package to allow for more rapid API iteration without inflicting breaking API changes on the original package, and then—once the API has stabilized—consider including it in the original package.

Honestly, I don't have any strong opinions on this yet. "long-term" goal can just easily be read as "wishful thinking" in the original email. I don't have any concrete plans, so for now it's mostly about "stop things being broken". Starting a new package/forking network for fast iteration is a nice idea and all, but just leaves everyone else with a broken network package atm. I was actually doubting whether I should even talk about "long term" plans, clearly it was a mistake to include that. I don't want this turning in an abstract bike shedding discussion about potential future plans. Cheers, Merijn

Kazu and I have been mostly derelict in our duties aside from critical bugs and base conflicts on new versions. +1 from me, but I would advise a strong preference towards backwards compatibly. Network is at the bottom of many stacks and breaking changes bubble far. On Oct 10, 2017 12:21 PM, "David Feuer" wrote:

A maintainer has arrived, and we should all rejoice! Is a proposal even necessary? Regardless, Merijn is obviously qualified, and the package obviously needs a maintainer, so +1.

On Oct 10, 2017 5:29 AM, "Merijn Verstraaten" wrote:

...

Hi hackage admins & libraries@ readers,

So, to the best of my knowledge 'network' is currently maintained by libraries@/the community, which is code for "not maintained". I've previously entertained the thought of taking up maintainership, but so far was held back by the fact that I don't do windows dev experience. I've discussed this in #ghc before and the consensus was that *nix only maintenance is probably still better than no maintenance.

I was inspired to finally write this email and try to take up maintenance after spending all day yesterday tomorrow debugging an issue in my code, only to realise that Network.ByteString.Lazy.getContents will literally *always* crash/throw an exception when used.

My plans are to: Short term: fix obvious errors like getContents, cut through the PR backlog on github to see what can be merged, what needs work, etc.

Medium term: Improve exception/error handling (network specific exception type that people can catch), better (async) exceptions safety guarantees/documentation of safety

Long term: I would like ditch the current (deprecated) high-level interface and replace it with modern high level API.

Now, the biggest problem is that I don't have experience developing on Windows and neither the time nor the motivation to get started with that, so I will need someone to take up co-maintainership of the windows parts (I'll probably send an email about this to -cafe if people are supportive of me taking up maintenance).

Cheers, Merijn

_______________________________________________ Libraries mailing list Libraries@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/libraries

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