Platform policy question: API compatability in minor releases

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Sun May 10 17:20:52 EDT 2009


Sven Panne wrote:
[..]
>    * IMHO, GNOME is a not a good example, although it is cited here over and 
> over again. GNOME is mainly supposed to be used by *end users*, while the 
> Haskell platform is supposed to be used by *programmers*. Both target groups 
> have very different needs. As a desktop user I probably don't care much about 
> some feature additions, as long as my good old working environment stays the 
> same. As a programmer I'd like to get bug fixes very quickly, get early 
> indications of the direction where a library evolving, try out new cool 
> features, etc. There is always a tension between stability and new features, 
> but given *our* target group, let's not focus on the wrong thing too heavily.

GHC and the haskell platform is open source, that means that users are the 
future developers, please don't target _existing_ developers only!  Ease of 
use for users should not be thrown away lightly, just look at the steps a user 
has to go through to install applications written in Ruby.

Also, don't forget that in order to make haskell easy to access, and promote 
applications written in haskell it must be easy to provide packages for 
different distros/OSs (Linux, BSD, Mac, Win).

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus@therning.org          Jabber: magnus@therning.org
http://therning.org/magnus         identi.ca|twitter: magthe

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