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

[Christopher Allen]

Those three reasons seem like they should be fatal by themselves. I don’t think the author was content with Simon’s condensation of the proposal but it fit my understanding. I propose we reject this as well.

> On Mar 12, 2017, at 10:52 AM, Roman Leshchinskiy <rleshchinskiy at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
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