[Haskell-cafe] Are explicit exports and local imports desirable in a production application?

[Henning Thielemann]

On Fri, 18 Sep 2020, Isaac Elliott wrote:

> I don't think that it's unreasonable in general to expect people to 
> explore a codebase via IDE tooling. But given Haskell's current 
> situation on that front, I currently agree with your approach to Haskell 
> imports/exports.

I already lost many hours exploring orphaned codebases. Imagine a five 
year old package or say ten years that you cannot compile anymore. You do 
not know with what version of GHC it worked, and even if you would know, 
you will not be able to get this GHC version running anymore. You do not 
know which library versions the package used, because Build-Depends is 
missing version ranges. Even if you would know, you would not be able to 
get old library versions compiled with new GHC versions anymore. This 
orphaned package uses identifiers like "prim" and you have to search 
whether this is a local identifier or whether it is external and then from 
which package? No IDE will help with code that misses so many information.