[Haskell-cafe] Re: Recompiling Hackage to estimate the impact of a change [Was: StricterLabelledFieldSyntax]

Maurí­cio briqueabraque at yahoo.com
Sun Jul 26 10:51:58 EDT 2009


>> In general, I think it would be a good idea to provide some statistics of how
>> many packages would break as the result of a backwards incompatible change.

> Agreed. And it should be required as part of release processes for GHC.

One possible alternative, or complementary, action would be
automating some kind of pool or voting from hackage packages
maintainers. This would give a more informative answer than just
breaks/doesn't break. The example that startted this thread would
certainly break some packages, but I believe 99% of maintainers
would say they could fix their code for compatibility before a new
compiler release.

(Even without voting, an automatic e-mail about language changes
could be sent to maintainers, as many may even not beeing doing
Haskell anymore. That could include some link to easily remove
their e-mail from any package maintenance.)

Maurício



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