A more useful Monoid instance for Data.Map

[Edward Kmett]

Breaking the semigroups instance breaks transitively almost every package
I've written. Did you attempt to fix each of those and see what was broken
downstream? I have 60+ packages that depend on semigroups alone, though I'm
not sure how many use the union instance publicly.

I am really not a fan of the idea of an interim release where no instance
exists, because it forces folks who do heavily use union to make a bunch of
orphans that cannot work together or abandon this functionality entirely.

It effectively makes it impossible for users like me who need to support a
wide-array of platforms.

If this change goes forward I'm going to have to go make a lot of code
uglier, as a currently useful Monoid will be dead to me for years, until I
can rely on it again portably across enough platforms to cover the window
I've agreed to support for my many of my packages.

If that is the consensus I'll go along with it, but I'll miss the
functionality.

-Edward

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 11:19 AM, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com> wrote:

> Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 8:06 AM, Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >>   2) We decide it is acceptable to break users code multiple times, drop
> >>      the Monoid instance and reintroduce the new instance after some
> >>      delay. The length of this delay could range from no delay at all
> >>      (allowing folks to quickly move to the new instance, although
> >>      potentially unwittingly) to several months (hoping that most users
> >>      will realize the change during this window).
> >>
> >
> > Before we even consider breaking user code we should see how much code
> will
> > be broken. If someone with spare cycles could download a copy of Hackage
> > and grep for uses of mappend on Data.Map that would be great.
>
> It seems like Christian did a pretty good approximation to this[1] in
> January, no?
>
>      After removing the Monoid instance for Map and IntMap, each reverse
>      dependency of containers was separately compiled under a standard
> setup of
>      GHC 7.6.1 in order to avoid shared dependency problems. Out of 1440
> reverse
>      dependencies, I could get 545 to compile. However, only the following
>      packages fail because of Monoid instance issues:
>
>      - caledon
>      - data-default
>      - dom-lt
>      - EnumMap
>      - i18n
>      - semigroups
>      - unamb-custom
>      - vacuum
>      - stringtable-atom
>
> Given that the Monoid instance is completely gone in this test, this
> list should be a superset of the packages that will break due to the
> semantic change.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
>
> [1] <CALCpNBpcmEfG1moxX=CbHOS2LwNGeLEFbTyyfteJYPwMoLR9SQ at mail.gmail.com>
>
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