Abstract FilePath Proposal

[Erik Hesselink]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2015 at 11:25 AM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> To all the people who are worried about breakage, I can guarantee this
> will cause breakage. It's a sad fact, and certainly the main negative
> to this proposal. I was on the fence initially when hvr suggested this
> change to me, but was convinced by performance and correctness.
> Whether the Haskell community as a whole thinks that makes it worth it
> is why it's a proposal. If anything, I'm concerned by the lack of
> people saying -1, please don't break my code...

I'm not convinced by the performance argument. Most people don't need
performance from the small amount of FilePath usage they have. Those
who do can switch to a different package. Now correctness would be a
good argument, but this proposal doesn't really add that much in that
respect, it seems.

I'm still on the fence, but leaning towards -1, but I'm not saying
please don't break my code. My code will be fine, I'm around to fix
it. I'm more worried about other people's code (that I might rely on),
maintainers that have left, or aren't that responsive, newcomers
reading old tutorials, people getting angry about needing more
CPP/fixing more code on new GHC releases, etc. We're still breaking
code on every new GHC release, and it seems the amount of breakage is
only increasing.

Erik