I'm going to disable DPH until someone starts maintaining it

Austin Seipp austin at well-typed.com
Mon Aug 4 11:47:35 UTC 2014


Everyone,

I'm still working on the AMP, and of course, things aren't going as
planned. Why is that?

I'm attempting to update `vector` to the latest version from GitHub,
as it has some fixes we need for AMP. Mostly, it has some instances we
need.

Unfortunately, this is basically impossible because dph is locked into
a vector fork of ours that we have been maintaining for *months*, and
doesn't work with the latest vector upstream (0.11) due to changes in
the stream representation. This means I can either:

 1) Fix everything in DPH to work with vector 0.11, which is probably
going to take a lot of work.
 2) Merely fix our fork of vector and let things continue working.
This is much easier than #1.

Now, you might say that #2 is clearly a preferable solution, and it's
very easy - so just do that, Austin!

But I don't want to do it. You could say this is the straw that has
broken the camel's back.

Why? Because I'm afraid I just don't have any more patience for DPH,
I'm tired of fixing it, and it takes up a lot of extra time to build,
and time to maintain.

In fact I'm the only person who's committed to it in *months*, and
that has only been to fix breakage. The hackage packages are out of
date and sync with what's in the repository (I can't upload them, nor
can anyone else besides Ben I believe).

So - why are we still building it, exactly?

We had a conversation about this months ago. The concern was that
things would break and we don't want it to fall out of sync. We're at
that point right now - things are breaking, it's out of sync, and it's
a pain to keep fixing it, and the actual *benefits* we get from doing
so are completely unclear to me. It basically just seems like extra
work for nothing, honestly.

Unless someone speaks[1] up *very* soon, I'm going to disable DPH
during ./validate and the regular build. It will be possible to build
it with a '--dph' flag (the dual of the current '--no-dph' flag),
although it will be broken very soon with these incoming changes.

Providing someone starts fixing it, I'm completely, 100% open to
re-enabling it in ./validate by default. But I'm personally tired of
fixing it.

I'm CC'ing Manuel, Geoff & Ben for their inputs.

[1] And by 'speak up', I mean I'd like to see someone actively step
forward address my concerns above in a decisive manner. With patches.

-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/


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