[ghc-steering-committee] Base library organisation

[Simon Marlow]

The link in the email is broken BTW, is there any updated URL?

Just based on the summary in the email, what immediately springs to mind is
that adding functions to ghc-experimental and then moving them to base
implies an extra migration that clients have to do in the future (would the
APIs in ghc-experimental be deprecated first? For how long? etc.). It
probably makes sense only to do this for additions of fairly large new
APIs, and for smaller changes we should probably shortcut the process and
make the GHC proposal in conjunction with a CLC proposal and land them in
GHC together. Streamlining this process would be good. Maybe the actual
proposal already says a lot of this?

Cheers
Simon


On Thu, 15 Jun 2023 at 10:04, Simon Peyton Jones <
simon.peytonjones at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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