HTTP and character encodings

[Duncan Coutts]

On 11 September 2012 00:22, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li> wrote:

> So I'm reluctantly drawn to the conclusion that the only reasonable
> thing to do is to remove the String instances from HTTP completely for now.
>
> I imagine this could be quite disruptive, but on the other hand people
> using the String instance are getting silently broken behaviour and a
> couple of people have been bitten by this recently.
>
> Any thoughts?

Yes. And I'd be in favour of removing the class entirely. Just use a
single ByteString type. I don't think the overloading buys us
anything. As for the effect on cabal-install, I've no problem with
making the appropriate fixes.

As for the pipes, conduits etc etc. My hope is that will stabilise at
some point with a clear right winner and we can adopt one of them, add
it to the platform etc.

(Personally I hope the "doing it right" approach of pipes works out in practice)

Duncan