Proposal: Taking over/up network maintainership

[Merijn Verstraaten]

Hi Dan,

The long term goal is not to revamp the entire API of network, just the high-level interface in the Network module. Currently (actually, for the entire past, like, 5 years I've been using network), the documentation of the Network module has stated:

"This module is kept for backwards-compatibility. New users are encouraged to use Network.Socket instead.

Network was intended as a "higher-level" interface to networking facilities, and only supports TCP."

Why keep around a deprecated high-level interface and recommend people use the low level one. Seems much better (long-term) to overhaul the high-level interface in Network so that it actually becomes recommend over writing code using Network.Socket itself.

Cheers,
Merijn

> On 10 Oct 2017, at 15:51, Dan Burton <danburton.email at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If the long term goal is to completely revamp the api, why not just write a new library?
> 
> On Oct 10, 2017 04:29, "Merijn Verstraaten" <merijn at inconsistent.nl> wrote:
> Hi hackage admins & libraries@ readers,
> 
> So, to the best of my knowledge 'network' is currently maintained by libraries@/the community, which is code for "not maintained". I've previously entertained the thought of taking up maintainership, but so far was held back by the fact that I don't do windows dev experience. I've discussed this in #ghc before and the consensus was that *nix only maintenance is probably still better than no maintenance.
> 
> I was inspired to finally write this email and try to take up maintenance after spending all day yesterday tomorrow debugging an issue in my code, only to realise that Network.ByteString.Lazy.getContents will literally *always* crash/throw an exception when used.
> 
> My plans are to:
> Short term: fix obvious errors like getContents, cut through the PR backlog on github to see what can be merged, what needs work, etc.
> 
> Medium term: Improve exception/error handling (network specific exception type that people can catch), better (async) exceptions safety guarantees/documentation of safety
> 
> Long term: I would like ditch the current (deprecated) high-level interface and replace it with modern high level API.
> 
> Now, the biggest problem is that I don't have experience developing on Windows and neither the time nor the motivation to get started with that, so I will need someone to take up co-maintainership of the windows parts (I'll probably send an email about this to -cafe if people are supportive of me taking up maintenance).
> 
> Cheers,
> Merijn
> 
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