[Haskell-cafe] Heads up: planned removal of String instances from HTTP package

[Johan Tibell]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> wrote:
> tl;dr: I'm planning on removing the String instances from the HTTP
> package. This is likely to break code. Obviously it will involve a major
> version bump.
>
> The basic reason is that this instance is rather broken in itself. A
> String ought to represent Unicode data, but the HTTP wire format is
> bytes, and HTTP makes no attempt to handle encoding.
>
> This was discussed on the libraries@ list a while back, but I'm happy to
> discuss further if there's a general feeling that this is a bad thing to do:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2012-September/018426.html
>
> I will probably upload the new version in a week or two.

I think it's the right thing to do. Providing a little upgrade guide
should help things to go smoother.