Yeah, I am sure a for-profit company really wants to maintain a compiler for a minimally used language.
There are much, _much_ better and easier ways to make money than what you are suggesting.
The idea that they would produce and give away these tools that fix real problems (whether you want to believe it or not) just to somehow down the line subvert the Haskell community to financially benefit is just _absurd_. If this were a larger programming community I could possibly believe it, but Haskell? Which is mostly used by hobbyist? Come on.
Have they ever refused to merge a PR because they want you to pay for it? What evidence do you have for this _at all_?
So? By that logic FP complete would not exist. Yet they clearly do. Try emailing them, they are in fact real. Whether you think haskell is too small or not, the fact is they exist to make money on haskell.
>The idea that they would produce and give away these tools that fix real problems
The tool does not fix real problems. It avoids a real problem, which the authors of the tool created in the first place. The problem does not exist if packages use upper version bounds. They refuse to, and then release a tool to move people to a curated subset of packages and versions instead, bypassing the problem they've imposed on everyone in the first place.
>just to somehow down the line subvert the Haskell community to financially benefit is just _absurd_
It is not down the line, or somehow. It is right now, exactly as described.
>If this were a larger programming community I could possibly believe it, but Haskell?
Again, that logic makes no sense.
>Have they ever refused to merge a PR because they want you to pay for it?
What does that have to do with anything? How is taking control of haskell related to refusing to merge PRs without payment?
>What evidence do you have for this _at all_?
I explained it quite clearly. Your response is to say nothing that has happened counts because "it is haskell".
No, it is not. Every FP complete employee does this. All of their packages are missing upper bounds. They actively promote not using upper bounds, writing blog posts and reddit comments telling people to violate the PVP. Just because they are not the only ones who do it, does not mean it is "independent" of them. They do it without fail, and they promote doing it to others.
>It just is a fact that `cabal-install` was not ready for the existence of the phenomenon of the immense industrial Haskell build.
That is not a fact, it is a fiction. Cabal-install did and still does work fantastically for our immense industrial haskell builds. Just broken packages like yesod were problems. And they were not problems with cabal-install, they were problems with people not understanding the consequences of no upper bounds, and expecting things that can not be possible to "just work". Stack did not solve this problem in any way, it simply bypassed it by restricting the set of packages to one curated set of versions.
Yesod is not broken. It builds just fine using a sane build tool. Yesod does not become broken because you insist on using a tool that crafts arbitrary build plans.
I have no idea how you came up with that absurd non-sequitur.
>Yesod is not broken. It builds just fine using a sane build tool. Yesod does not become broken because you insist on using a tool that crafts arbitrary build plans.
Nothing in that is accurate at all. There is nothing arbitrary about a cabal build plan.
> I have no idea how you came up with that absurd non-sequitur.
You can dispute the accuracy, but "the PVP as written puts too much burden on maintainers" was a part of the justification at the time for removing upper bounds. See, for instance, the following from someone with no connection to FP Complete that I'm aware of: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2012-August/...
"As someone who recurrently is nudging a large number of maintainers every major ghc release to bump their bounds, I favor the no upper bounds approach!"
It was not a non-sequitur, but an objection to your assertion that there was no problem with the PVP.
You may be interested to know that Carter (the guy you're quoting) knows better today, and has even become a Hackage Trustee whose mission is more or less to uphold those very PVP upper bounds ;-)
I am not arguing that the move away from the PVP was correct - I was uncertain at the time and I remain uncertain.
Yes, people make mistakes. He no longer favors that approach, as he learned how bad it is. The difference is that FPC employees still continue to push it even when they know the problems.
My point was that the comment above was specifically an obvious reference to concerns that had been voiced during that time (and speculation as to why they might have been less relevant to you) - far from an "absurd non-sequitur."
I am aware of that. And again, that in no way contradicts or discredits what I said. Which was that FP complete employees consistently do this. I never said they were the only people who do it. I never said they were the first people to do it. I said they do it. I really do not understand where the confusion is coming from.
You said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12058419):
> The tool does not fix real problems. It avoids a real problem, which the authors of the tool created in the first place. The problem does not exist if packages use upper version bounds.
The implicit assertion in the following comments (which I found painfully clear, but maybe you genuinely missed it - surely we read from different contexts) was: Even if the tooling only solves a problem introduced by particular practices, it can be a "real problem" if those practices address a real problem themselves.
Or you know what, don't. I'm growing convinced that you're not engaging in good faith anywhere in this thread. And if this is going to be regular practice, please GTFO of the Haskell community.
I am engaging in good faith, as I have always done. I have done so under this same name, here, on r/haskell, on haskell-cafe and haskell-beginners, on #haskell, and in person.
I said that if you are engaged in bad faith, and if you will persist in doing so, you need to GTFO. I stand by that statement.
That you perceive yourself to be acting in good faith and me to be acting otherwise does not make it hypocrisy.
If you are intending to engage in good faith, please observe that - at the very least - we seem to be having a bad time successfully communicating in this format. Perhaps we can try some other medium? If you're in the bay area, I'll buy you a beer (or social equivalent).
That is very hard to believe consider the amount of dishonest rhetoric on display.
>I said that if you are engaged in bad faith, and if you will persist in doing so, you need to GTFO
You did not. You said if I continue I need to GTFO. I am not engaging in bad faith, I am being honest and clear, and you are respond with ridiculous strawman attacks.
>If you're in the bay area, I'll buy you a beer (or social equivalent).
I'm in a very different bay area than the one I assume you refer to. I do not see any reason why text is a problem. You simply need to read the words I write and respond to that, rather than read then, make up an imaginary version of me, give that imaginary version of me a bunch of other opinions you don't like, and then respond to those.
I said,
> I'm growing convinced that you're not engaging in good faith anywhere in this thread. And if this is going to be regular practice, please GTFO of the Haskell community.
As I wrote it, the (now italicized) "this" was definitely meant to refer to the just mentioned "not engaging in good faith", not to your behavior whatever it may be. This was less clear than I'd meant it to be, although I still think my intended interpretation is favored.
If we wish to litigate this, please point out a single instance of dishonest rhetoric from me. Be very specific about how it is dishonest. Bear in mind that there may have been genuine misunderstanding by either of us, and we were probably neither as clear as we thought ourselves to be.
And plenty of non FP Complete employees do this. What's your point?
I said nothing even remotely like that. Lying about what other people say is not constructive.
> The people involved have been the ones artificially creating the problem by refusing to follow established community standards (the package versioning policy)
and
> The tool does not fix real problems. It avoids a real problem, which the authors of the tool created in the first place. The problem does not exist if packages use upper version bounds. They refuse to, and then release a tool to move people to a curated subset of packages and versions instead, bypassing the problem they've imposed on everyone in the first place.
-- in fact they are no different from e.g. bos and amazonka and many many others; it's a view, we oppose it.
> then they release a tool to "solve" the problem they created, all while spewing FUD about cabal and the actual haskell developers and community.
Again it is demonstrable that they didn't create any problem. And they don't say anything against cabal that thousands of others didn't say. And on and on through your whole chain of nonsense.
Just give it up. They have a view we reject. The solution is to continue to argue against it .. keeping in mind that what we are asking for is torture to maintain even where you are dealing with only 10 external dependencies. It happens that I have just spent basically all morning dealing with dependency problems with four or five pipes-related libraries which keep rigorous upper bounds. Frankly it's unimaginable what yesod or amazonka would have to go through basically every morning with 10-20 times as many other-people's libraries to keep track of. There needs to be some automated way of doing it.
Attribution?
And frankly, couldn't you fork stack?