[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining lambdabot

[Jan Stolarek]

Hi all,

as some of you may have noticed Lambdabot doesn't build on GHC 7.6.1 due to OldException being 
removed (and a few other changes). I updated the code so that it builds on latest GHC release. 
The updated code is available here:

https://github.com/killy9999/lambdabot/tree/upstream

It builds on Linux, but I am not 100% certain that it will build on Windows. If it doesn't I will 
be grateful for reporting this (and any other) issues on the bug tracker:

https://github.com/killy9999/lambdabot/issues

The changes required to make the code run weren't as small as I initially thought they will be. In 
some places this resulted in a bit ugly code, but aside from that I think that everything should 
work correctly.

Now I would like to do a bit of maintanance on the project, since the code is a bit of a mess and 
it could use some cleanup. My plans are:

- clean up the package namespace by placing existing modules in Lambdabot module
- integrate lambdabot-utils into lambdabot (already done)
- reformat the code so that it's easier to read

ans if time allows:

- cleanup some messy code
- update the package dependencies so that lambdabot relies on maintained libraries (e.g. I thought 
about replacing readline with haskeline).

This changes would be quite invasive and code wouldn't be compatible with the lambdabot repo on 
haskell.org. So before I start making any of them I would like to hear from the community if such 
changes in the source code of lambdabot would be  considered helpful and acceptable.

Janek