I can no longer maintain containers

David Feuer david.feuer at gmail.com
Fri Apr 8 07:10:19 UTC 2016


Just to be clear: no one is looking to make major breaking changes to
containers. If it is split, it will have to be done in such a way that
people depending on it won't even notice, except by watching Cabal build
messages flash by. If that's not currently possible, then I don't think
*anyone* would want to split it now.
On Apr 8, 2016 3:05 AM, "Sven Panne" <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just to add my 2c to the "to split or not to split" topic: Please do not
> split such a fundamental package! As already mentioned, it is the 2nd most
> used package on Hackage (only slightly behind "bytestring" and ignoring
> "base"). Even making tiny incompatible changes will immediately break
> hundreds, if not thousands of packages on Hackage. If this is really
> planned, there should be an extremely good reason for it, and I can't see
> one: The package is very small and there is almost no activity in the
> repository (https://github.com/haskell/containers/graphs/commit-activity),
> so maintenance burden can't be a valid reason for splitting. And even if it
> one wants to split, there are lots of orthogonal aspects of containers:
> lazy/strict, order-based/hash-based, set/map/multimap, sorted/unsorted
> variants, catenable or not, etc. Which of these should be the splitting
> criterion? The extreme of putting each data structure into its own package
> seems to be a little bit excessive.
>
> OTOH I'm all for adding missing functionality to "containers", at least if
> they don't introduce incompatible changes.
>
> Of course one can add additional packages with subsets of "containers",
> keeping the latter untouched. If most Hackage authors switch to the new
> packages, "containers" can be phased out. But even if that happens (which I
> doubt), this will take quite a few years.
>
> Cheers,
>    S.
>
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