mtl, transformers, and monads-fd are in an unhappy place

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Hi, gents -

I've lately been writing some application code that, by virtue of the
libraries it uses, depends on both mtl and monads-fd. Alas, this means that
I have two incompatible versions of some of the most widely used monad
transformers in scope, and I have to carefully import the right version of
Control.Monad.Trans:

{-# LANGUAGE PackageImports #-}
import qualified "mtl" Control.Monad.Trans as M
import qualified "monads-fd" Control.Monad.Trans as F

Then I have to be equally careful in using the right version of liftIO
depending on the monad I'm working in.

This is a really bad situation for some of the platform's core libraries to
be in, even temporarily, as it puts a solid barrier in place to non-wizardly
people due to the confusion induced, especially since the kind of code I'm
writing is the kind of appealing-yet-vanilla stuff that I'd hope would
simply work (using the Snap web framework and an XMPP library).

Greg Collins mentioned that there's some kind of plan for mtl to become a
shell package that depends on transformers and monads-fd. Given my
experience, I'd consider advancing this plan and getting it into the next
Haskell Platform release (and ready before GHC 7 ships) to be a matter of
the utmost urgency.

What kind of help can I provide you to rush this along?

Regards,
Bryan.
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