RFC: Adding support for an API-"since"-version-attribute to Haddock?

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> writes:

>> Would such an enhancement to Haddock be worthwhile or is it a bad idea?
>> Has such a proposal come up in the past already? Are there alternative
>> approaches to consider?
>
> It would be even cooler to automatically figure them out from the
> hackage history.

I don't think this can ever be reliable if it is to detect more than
mere additions of new functions at the source-level.

Just modifying a function (w/o changing the type-signature) doesn't mean
its semantics have to change -- could be just refactoring or optimizing
that lead to the implementation (but not the semantics) changing.

Also, /not/ modifying a function doesn't necessarily mean that its
semantics are unchanged, as it could be just some semantic change to a
function outside the function (but depended upon by the function) that
could cause the function to modify its semantics.

Thus, IMHO it will always require some manual intervention by the
developer (although it may be surely aided by tools helping with
analysing the source-code versioning history and pointing out possible
candidates)