[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: parsec2 - a fork or parsec circa 2.1

[Antoine Latter]

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 1:55 AM, Ivan Miljenovic
<ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 August 2010 16:24, Jean-Philippe Bernardy <bernardy at chalmers.se> wrote:
>> Can you explain why you could not use the parsec name,
>> with revision number (say) 2.2?
>>
>> This would help improve hackage/cabal/... versioning mechanism.
>
> I think the idea is to give it more prominence: if you go to
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/parsec, the version that hits you
> immediately is 3.1.0; it isn't as immediately obvious that there is a
> new parsec-2.x version out.

Also, quite a few folks like to map a package on Hackage to a package
in a distribution. If there is a legitimate need for the 2.x series to
be maintained, this could get it into various distributions.

>
> That said, if parsec2 is only a bug-fix branch of parsec-2.x, is there
> any particular reason work couldn't be done to improve the performance
> of parsec-3 when using the compatibility layer (and even improving the
> performance of parsec-3 overall) rather than a specific branch/fork?

The release of parsec-3.1 dramatically improved the performance of
parsec3 to roughly parsec-2.1 levels. So I don't know of any downside
to switching over to the compatibility layer other the fact that it's
a much newer code-base, and that it's a much further departure

>
> Unless the API changes from either parsec-2.x or the compatibility
> modules in parsec-3, I'm not sure how much use this would be; as it
> stands, in Gentoo we already tweak a lot of package cabal files to
> remove the upper bounds on parsec some of them impose, and we're
> likely to do the same to make packages that use parsec2 just use
> "normal" parsec instead.

I don't have a huge problem with that - if there is anything wrong
with parsec3 or it's compatibility layer I'm as likely as anyone else
to submit a patch to fix it.

There seemed to be a demand for te older branch to resume maintenance,
and I'm more than happy to keep it building and roll releases.

Antoine

>
> --
> Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
> Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
> IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com
>