[Haskell-cafe] Policy for taking over a package on Hackage

[Simon Meier]

2011/5/25 Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com>:
> On 25 May 2011 22:17, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi Ivan
>>
>> Forks are good, no?
>>
>> The Parsec experience has suggested to me at least, that new author's
>> "capping" another author's work by bumping up to a major version,
>> causes a significant difficulties even when the original author has
>> gone.
>>
>> As for wl-pprint, it was a very tidy library in its original
>> implementation - it's a pity it now has name clashes with Applicative.
>> My feeling is that a new library in a new namespace with some
>> attention to new combinator names would be better.
>
> Such as?  I'm _hopeless_ at making up names... ;-)
>
> Having a new package would require a new name and new module
> namespace, let alone thinking up new names for combinators...
>
> Also, by clashes with Applicative, are you referring to empty and <$>
> ?  I'm not sure if a better name than "empty" can be found; as for
> <$>, maybe using pretty's notation of $$ and $+$ rather than <$> and
> <$$> ?

What about 'emptyDoc'? Moreover, if you are changing the names of
combinators, then moving them away from Applicative and Arrow would be
a good idea; i.e., don't use <+>, as it already used by ArrowPlus.
Moreover, if you can make a Monoid instance such that `mappend` equals
<>, you would also make the library compatible to a future
introduction of (<>) = mappend.

best regards,
Simon