[ghc-steering-committee] Base library organisation

[Simon Peyton Jones]

Dear GHC Steering Committee

Over the last few weeks, Ben Gamari and I have been discussing with Andrew
and Julian from the Core Libraries Committee how to make the Core Libraries
Committee and the GHC developers work together more fluidly; and that
includes the GHC Steering Committee.

We now have a fairly well fleshed out proposal here.
<https://github.com/Ericson2314/tech-proposals/blob/ghc-base-libraries/proposals/accepted/050-ghc-base-libraries.rst>

I hope you like it.  As far as this committee is concerned there are two
particular points of note

   1. We propose a new package, *ghc-experimental*, which depends on *base*.
   Many GHC proposals involve defining new types and functions.  The idea is
   that these would initially be in *ghc-experimental*.  After they
   stabilise and become widely adopted, the author (or anyone else) can make a
   CLC proposal to move them to *base*, which has much stronger stability
   guarantees.
   2. Section 5.1 suggests a mechanism to involve CLC members in proposals
   that involve new functions and types, at an earlier stage.  Some
involve *changing
   *existing types and functions.  It is clearly unproductive for us to
   debate such things at length, and only *then *to land it on the CLC.

   Section 5.1 also suggests that proposals should explicitly (in a
   separate section) call out


   - What new types and functions it defines
   - What existing types and functions are changed.

We should add that to our template.

At the moment we are just sharing the proposal with relevant stakeholders
(yourselves, CLC, stack folk, cabal folk etc), so that we can polish any
rough edges before making it public.

So, any views?  Personally I think this is a Big Step Forward.

Simon
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