Summary and call for discussion on text proposal

[Gregory Collins]

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Thomas and I would like to summarise the current point of contention
> in the text library proposal with the aim of resolving the issue and
> getting the package accepted.
>
> It seems clear that we all want the package accepted, the disagreement
> is over details of the API. The problem here is not the amount of work
> to make the changes some people have been suggesting, the problem is
> disagreement over whether change is necessary and if so what change.

By the way,

Myself and several other people have been following this discussion
with increasing levels of annoyance and frustration. My understanding
was that the HP process was intended to help with the overall design
of libraries and to head off serious problems before too much time is
wasted on discussion, NOT to devolve into extended megathreads over
which colour to paint the bike shed.

Another point I would like to make is that unless I'm mistaken, even
if text is accepted into the platform, that doesn't mean that
maintainership of the library is assigned to libraries at haskell.org: it
stays with Bryan. Given that he's repeatedly stated that the API is
the way that it is because that's the way he *wants* it to be, and he
has a plausible rationale for this, this entire discussion is MOOT and
we should immediately stop wasting time and move to a vote on
accepting text as-is.

If the fact that the names of a couple of functions aren't absolutely
consistent with their analogues in Data.List is enough to cause you to
vote no, then so be it --- but given how far above the bar text is on
a quality basis compared to some of the libraries we grandfathered in,
IMHO that would be an indication that something about this process is
completely broken and it should be abandoned forthwith.

Cheers,

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>