Well changes like Generalise the instances of Eq, Ord, Read and Show for Compose · Issue #35 · haskell/core-libraries-committee · GitHub / Proposal: Relax instances for Functor combinators; put superclasses on <class>1 to make less-breaking · Issue #10 · haskell/core-libraries-committee · GitHub I think are really important, but it’s hard to summon the energy to work on them because realistically we at work just got to GHC 8.10 (especially due to GHCJS) it could be years before we get a compilers with a base refecting changes we get in now.
That’s profoundly demoralizing.
Conversely, if we we decoupled some modules retroactively, we could maintain new base with old GHC. That means seeing the benefits of getting something approved in maybe months.
The process to see what the breakage is is also fundamentally making a new (unofficial) version of base for an existing GHC. So having the split would make that existing process better.
We had talked about how recently GHC breakage seems more noticeable than core library breakage recently. (Though I agree with @cdsmith that could change and if anything represents us running out of energy after applicative-monad and semigroup-monoid are so much work.) But what didn’t come up is that it’s precisely being stuck on old GHCs that makes not being able to swap in a newer base
so frustrating!
relude
can’t help with anything relating to type classes and instances.