[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Gregory Collins]

On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 6:48 AM, Adrian May
<adrian.alexander.may at gmail.com>wrote:

> May I venture a guess that you never tried to manage a 5-10 million line
> project?
>

I build a project a couple orders of magnitude bigger than that dozens of
times every day. Similar stories are not uncommon among people who inhabit
this list. But thanks, citing that figure as an excuse to be condescending
to that person was really worth a giggle this morning. :)


That's what I do. I'm not a programmer, I'm a manager. I run teams of a few
> dozen people on subprojects within huge telecom-related projects, and my
> job is to try and keep it all from collapsing in a heap of bugs.
>
> If you had any experience of that you'd run a mile from any technology
> with this hit and miss attitude.
>

You keep saying things like this. Actually, you're in this situation
because one or more people within your organization have made a succession
of very bad choices. Haskell is not to blame. Personally, I almost can't
believe you're taking this tack on the list now that the details of your
situation are apparent: you've let a 5-10 million line project spiral out
of control without putting the necessary software engineering
infrastructure and controls in place.



> I can't tell people what version they should be using because half of them
> work for a completely different company. They have their own dependencies
> coming from other projects that I'm not even allowed to know about.
>

... and the truth emerges. This issue you're having reflects a lot more
strongly on your technical culture than it does on any instability in GHC.

Listen: someone within your organization decided to build a product based
on a very old library which is no longer maintained by anyone. If this
library were actually critical to your business, you would fork it and
either get someone in-house or pay a contractor to fix bugs and keep it up
to date. (And there are plenty of people here who might be interested in a
contract gig to fix this for you if you asked).

Repeatedly claiming in the most histrionic terms that GHC ought to freeze
forever and never deprecate anything again so that you can avoid doing your
job properly is simply not realistic, especially given Haskell's social
culture (newsflash: it's a research platform), and is not going to garner
you any sympathy on this list, either. You could practically be the poster
boy for why we have the motto "avoid success at all costs".

You have two options: stay on GHC 6.x (the bits didn't get deleted from the
internet), and if that isn't practical, fix Wash (or pay someone to do it
if you don't know how) and get on with your life.

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20130503/2a6b2399/attachment.htm>