[ghc-steering-committee] Stability

[Arnaud Spiwack]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2023 at 11:16, Simon Peyton Jones <
simon.peytonjones at gmail.com> wrote:

> The mandate here is “make Haskell more stable” which is quite commendable,
>> but it's also very imprecise
>>
> Is it imprecise?  I think our goal is pretty simple:* a program that
> compiles and runs with GHC 9.8 should also compile and run with GHC 9.10.*
> That's it.   I think you subscribe to this as a general goal?
>

I fully subscribe to this goal.


> Clearly that is a problem today: many users report that they are using
> years-old GHCs because the cost of upgrading to the latest version is so
> high.
>

Indeed.

The General Rules I suggested at the start of this thread do no more than
> articulate that goal, and give some general principles that we seek to
> follow.  I think that does no more than make *explicit *our *implicit *way
> of working (we spend a lot of time on back-compat discussions).  That is,
> nothing really new here, just making it more explicit.
>
> Can you be more specific about what you don't like?
>

The general rules are perfectly reasonable. I'm much less enthusiastic
about an `experimental` flag of sorts.

But here's the thing: I claim that GR{1-3} aren't going to solve the
stability problem. I'm confident about this because they're already the
policy. And while it's not entirely impossible to imagine that writing them
down more prominently will solve the problems that we have, I don't believe
we should count on it. So anyway, we've been having this policy, have we
failed to apply it? Why? Or maybe the reason why stability is a concern is
because of reasons that aren't caught by this policy, then what is missing?
I'm asking these questions in earnest: I really don't know. And I don't
think we'll actually make significant progress without getting answers to
these questions.
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