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

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Adding Ben, Roman, Gabi

SImon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Austin Seipp
| Sent: 04 August 2014 12:48
| To: ghc-devs at haskell.org
| Cc: Manuel Chakravarty; Geoffrey Mainland
| Subject: I'm going to disable DPH until someone starts maintaining it
| 
| 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 The hackage packages are out of date and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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