Summary and call for discussion on text proposal

[Michael Snoyman]

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net> wrote:
> 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.

+1. I think this process is only scaring people from writing quality
libraries, lest they be subjected to this endless bikeshedding. Bryan
has addressed all of the substantive issues that I'm aware of that
have ever been brought up about text. Let's just accept that the
library is acceptable- and quite extraordinary- as is.

And sorry to hijack this thread, but I wanted to bring up what a
slightly more important (IMHO) topic: should the Haskell Platform be
endorsing a single, canonical approach to solving problems? Right now,
both text and utf8-string support UTF8 encoding/decoding. Would it be
appropriate to try and deprecate usage of the latter in favor of using
the more well-maintained, more performant text package?

Michael