[ghc-steering-committee] Proposal 34: The INCOMPLETE_CONTEXTS pragma proposal

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

Hi,

I propose we reject this.

Reasons:

1. The motivation is quite weak. In the case of tracing this seems
like a rather large hammer for such a small nail. The other examples
in the document aren't convincing to me at all. As Simon PJ points
out, a wildcard context would handle most of the cases in question.

2. The extension is dangerous, as the proposal itself acknowledges. It
explicitly requires that "Hackage should refuse to accept any package
upload" with this pragma. To me, this seems like far too much
machinery for this (and a lot of people don't use Hackage). A compiler
flag might be more reasonable but even then, I don't see the benefits
as being worth it.

3. The extension is underspecified. It's not clear to me what the
exact semantics are and what an implementation would look like.

Thanks,

Roman