2008-10-11 Hackage status with GHC 6.10

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 11:12 +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | RULES are always parsed (no flags or language extensions needed). They
> | also go into the .hi files (unless you use the obscure option to change
> | that), so they are exported for all client modules.
> 
> The latter isn't true, and I think that's what Henning is objecting
> to.

Oops.

As I read it Henning wants the RULES parsed with or without -O. That bit
is now much simpler than it used to be.

I didn't read his objection as wanting them always exported even if the
defining module was not built without -O, just that they should always
be parsed and checked.

> Currently, without -O GHC puts the absolute minimum in interface files
> to get the clients to compile

Right. My mistake.

> Currently without -O GHC therefore does *not* put RULES in the
> interface file.  I thought that was consistent, since they are to do
> with optimisation.

Right. 

> If, however, there's a consensus that RULES should be persisted even
> without -O, that'd be easy to arrange. For example, I think that
> deprecations are persisted unconditionally.

I think the current behaviour is consistent and makes sense.

We do want the minimum without -O because it gives more minimal rebuilds
if the .hi files do not change so often.

I've updated the wiki page on 6.10 upgrading:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Upgrading_packages#Changes_to_RULES_parsing

Duncan