Let me suggest what the I think the decoupling issue is about (and gently remind abab and atravers that there was a long argument on haskell’s popularity at The evolution of GHC and encourage them to keep any further comments there)
- Updates to base can cause people to need to update other code.
- People may want to update ghc to get bugfixes, new features, etc.
- In so doing, they may not want to update base, so as to avoid needing to update other code, including a potential nest of transitive dependencies.
- If base was decoupled so older versions could be installed on newer GHCs, this would alleviate this situation somewhat.
That’s it.