The future of the Haskell98 and Haskell2010 packages

Hello all, A few weeks ago, I opened up a discussion about a particular GHC bug, #9590. This bug is concerned with the future of the Haskell98 and Haskell2010 packages, which try to embody their two respective Haskell standards. They do this by shipping the 'exact library specification' that the standards have. In our discussion this past week between me, SimonM, SPJ, Herbert and Mikolaj, we came to this discussion again since the 7.10 STABLE freeze is almost here, and it seems to have puttered out. In this discussion, we came to the conclusion we think these packages should be removed from GHC for the 7.10 release. To be clear, this was not a 100% unanimous decision or formal vote; SimonM and I supported removal, while everyone else seemed to be rather undecided or ambivalent. Most of the proposed alternative solutions seemed somewhat one-off. Furthermore, we didn't find a solution that wouldn't either A) require some amount of GHC modifications (possibly indefinitely into the future) to support these packages, or B) changing the definitions in these packages to deviate from the standard. Instead, we proposed that we instead overhaul part of the GHC users manual, and clearly outline our deviations from the Haskell 2010 standard library. To be clear: GHC can still typecheck, compile, and efficiently execute Haskell 2010 code. It is merely the distribution of compatible packages that has put us in something of a bind. Furthermore, we aren't aware of any other compilers/platforms like ours that try to maintain such stringent separation of these packages, and furthermore, both of the haskell{98,2010} packages have a fairly small number of reverse dependencies. I'd like to hear what people think about this. It seems likely I will move forward on this by the end of the week unless we face very strong opposition to this idea, or someone is willing to fix #9590 somehow for us. -- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/