New libraries process

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

[Changing subject line; sorry for the odd initial one!]


| "widespread support" is a bit of a wishy-washy phrase. If 7 people
| want it, is that widespread support?
| ...should be added. However, there's a strong selection bias here and
| ...This is one of the places where having a real maintainer is crucial.

I agree.  The maintainer should take account of selection bias.  I've added words to that effect.

| experiencing. If the maintainer is "required" to accept such changes,

No, we intended that the  maintainer is never *required* to accept a change.  To quote "the community offers opinions; the maintainer decides".   If you think that point should be made even more strongly, can you go ahead and edit?

| It's not clear when the "deadline for discussion" should be used. Does
| it apply to any change or only public API changes? Does it apply even
| if it's the maintainer that making the change? Having to spent two
| weeks (even though most of the time is spent waiting) to make a single
| change is too high an overhead for me. I suspect I would just not
| bother making the change.

Our intention was to make sure that the community had *some* opportunity to comment on a change that may affect them.   You point about public APIs is a good one -- for internal changes perhaps all a proposer needs to is to persuade the maintainer.  (Or, if the proposer is the maintainer, persuade himself.)  

| To make things more concrete, what steps are
| required of the (future) maintainer of containers who wants to add a
| strict version of some function (many functions are missing a strict
| version at the moment)?

So this is a public-API change, but you could argue that it's one that cannot hurt a client because it's only widening the interface.

What about if you wanted to change the signature of a function in the API.  Wouldn't it be reasonably to give your community a chance to react?

| Depends entirely on what the process ends up being. 

Good.  I'll be dissatisfied if we don't end up with a process that you think is sane.

Simon