[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Niklas Hambüchen]

I think you missed my point.

My point was to show that what you understand as "backward
compatibility" here is totally delivered by Haskell and its environment,
and how easy it is to be "conservative" (where "keeping it running" as
it is is only a matter of renaming a few imports).

> it seems important to fix that stuff

It is not.

I did not "fix" Flippi nor WASH; it is the same unmaintained code that
you should not use. If there's a security hole or it just doesn't work,
nobody will fix it, nobody will even mention it or care, because it is
clear that this is code from the past.

> it's a liability to Haskell to have broken
> code kicking around where people might find it.

There really is no reason to delete open-source code.

> and there's nothing on the WASH page to warn anybody.

The fact that it doesn't build and that the last change is from 2007 the
*is* the warning that it is completely unmaintained and not the way to
do things today.

(One could even say that by making it build on 7.6, I have removed this
warning and given the illusion that everything is fine.)

Of course I agree that it would be better if there were warnings on
their web sites that said "sorry guys, this project is dead now".

I would even be happy with newhackage sending every package maintainer a
quarterly question "Would you still call your project X 'maintained'?"
for each package they maintain; Hackage could really give us better
indications concerning this.

Still I'd say that in this case, the fact that it did not build, hasn't
had a single change in the last half decade, and that you cannot find
any recent discussion about it anywhere on the Internet, make it pretty
clear what is going on here, even for non-technical people.

> Please don't say that it's my culture's fault.