[ghc-steering-committee] GHC 2020

[Eric Seidel]

Github user AntC2 just pointed out that they don't have any way to comment on the discussion that's now happening on the wiki[1]. It turns out that editing privileges are currently restricted to committee members. We could open the floodgates, but, like Iavor, I don't think a wiki will give us the experience we want with many different interested parties.

I think a useful alternative would be to create a new repository in the ghc-proposals org, and use issues to discuss individual extensions. That lets us retain the ease of community involvement that has made the regular proposals process so successful. And it separates extensions into their own discussion threads, which will help us follow the discussion of more controversial extensions. It does mean that we'd have a single, evolving proposal for GHC 2020 instead of the community submitting different fully-formed proposals for us to consider, but I think this is fine given the special nature of GHC 2020, we're not introducing any new functionality that needs specification and consideration of alternative approaches, we're just choosing a coherent set of existing extensions to bundle together into a quasi-standard.

If that sounds like a useful approach, I'm happy to set up the new repository and process.

[1]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/360#issuecomment-685236227

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020, at 12:18, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> Thanks for doing this Richard.   I wonder if there might be a different 
> way to organize this, that is more suitable for discussion? 

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 11:55 AM Richard Eisenberg <rae at richarde.dev> wrote:
> > I initially wrote a long email in this space, with numbered criteria (heavily based on Iavor's suggestions) and my thoughts on the individual extensions proposed. But I realized this would quickly grow unwieldy. I thus have created https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/wiki/GHC2020, where I propose we track this conversation. Specifically: arguments for or against an individual extension should go right on the wiki, labeled with the author's name/initials. This preserves these arguments for later. Then, to keep the conversation moving, write back to this list just mentioning which extensions you've commented on.