[Haskell-cafe] Heads up: planned removal of String instances from HTTP package

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi,

tl;dr: I'm planning on removing the String instances from the HTTP
package. This is likely to break code. Obviously it will involve a major
version bump.

The basic reason is that this instance is rather broken in itself. A
String ought to represent Unicode data, but the HTTP wire format is
bytes, and HTTP makes no attempt to handle encoding.

This was discussed on the libraries@ list a while back, but I'm happy to
discuss further if there's a general feeling that this is a bad thing to do:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2012-September/018426.html

I will probably upload the new version in a week or two.

Cheers,

Ganesh