[ghc-steering-committee] Stability

[Simon Peyton Jones]

>
> 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.
>

I agree.  They won't solve it.   (Incidentally, it's not just GR{1-3} but
also the categorisation into stable/experimental, which GR{1-3} is
predicated on.)   But I think they will help.  You are sceptical, but
that's fine.  We'll see.  Provided they are not harmful [and I don't think
you are saying that it is] we can just adopt them and move on.

Completely-solving a complex, multi-faceted problem is hard.   But that
should not discourage us from making incremental progress towards that
goal.   The base-library splitting proposal (now agreed) is another piece
of incremental progress that does not solve the problem, but will help.

I am not against (in addition) trying to identify particularly painful
problems in the past, and seeing what their root causes were.  I just don't
want to de-rail making incremental progress at the same time.

I don't like to see you unhappy, Arnaud!

Simon

On Fri, 13 Oct 2023 at 10:38, Arnaud Spiwack <arnaud.spiwack at tweag.io>
wrote:

>
>
> 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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