Library proposals

[Johan Tibell]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 12:38 PM, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
> A fair number of people, including you and I, have commit access.
> There is nothing to stop any of us from cleaning up the code, writing
> tests or polishing documentation, and most of us would be happy to commit
> such changes from occasional contributors.

But it doesn't happen (to any large extent). We should ask ourselves
why that is. Perhaps it's because since so many people are
"responsible" (i.e. have commit access), no one feels responsible for
the overall heath/design of the library.

> The only thing the current setup prevents us from doing is changing
> interfaces without getting wider agreement -- I think that's a feature.

I'm not sure I agree. For example, IntMap didn't have strict versions
insert and insertWith, making it practically impossible (due to crap
performance) to efficiently keep an IntMap where the value was a
counter of any kind (e.g. an Int). That took 4 months to fix as fixing
it involved an API addition. FOUR MONTHS. If it had been my library it
would have taken five minutes.

Lets look at it another way, since the libraries maintained by
libraries@ have a stricter process for API changes, they ought to have
a better API than the ones that are maintained outside the process,
right? At least in my opinion, the best libraries are all outside the
libraries@ process: bytestring, binary, text, etc.

Johan