No subject

suggest a bit more structure than this. API changes can wreak havoc with many 
packages. Therefore, I believe that we should _strongly_encourage_ upward 
compatibility in API changes.

This doesn't require that APIs remain static, nor need it cause a lot of 
difficulty for maintainers, if we _encourage_ smooth migration to the new API. 
One possible approach would be to add conditional compilation directives so the 
new and old APIs can co-exist initially. This would provide an easy workaround 
for packages that depend on the old API. There may be better methods than this, 
but this is always an option. Alternatively, we should try to develop adapter 
libraries (e.g., old-time and old-locale) so old code can still be compiled with 
minimal modification.

There are still many packages that depend on base-3 and the switch to ghc-7.0 
and base-4.3 breaks them. From the perspective of an enterprise developer the 
current situation is a show-stopper. In order to gain more enterprise 
penetration we need to make upgrades less painful.

Cheers,

Howard