New http-client and mono-traversable releases

I'm happy to announce the release of a number of packages today, but mostly this comes down to upgrades to http-client and mono-traversable. This blog post will cover the main changes you should be aware of it you are using one of these two packages. In addition to these two packages, the following related packages are being released as well: http-client-tls, http-client-openssl, http-conduit, mono-traversable-instances, minlen, chunked-data, conduit-combinators, mutable-containers, classy-prelude, classy-prelude-conduit, classy-prelude-yesod.

http-client

http-client is an HTTP client library leveraged by a number of other packages, including http-conduit, pipes-http, and wreq. This release is mostly about addressing issue #193, about an controversial design decision to throw runtime exceptions on non-successful HTTP response statuses. If you want a quick explanation of what's changed and what you should do:

• If the HTTP server you're talking to gives a non-success HTTP response status (e.g., 404 not found), you will no longer get a runtime exception by default.

  • If you want the old behavior, switch to the parseUrlThrow function
  • The parseUrl function remains with the old behavior, but is deprecated in favor of parseRequest
  • The IsString instance has also switched to the non-throwing behavior

• In an effort to make the remaining exceptions more useful, and avoid people accidentally relying on the old exception behavior, there's a new structure to the HttpException type. In particular, almost all exceptions are now contained in the HttpExceptionContent type, and will be wrapped up with the HttpExceptionRequest constructor, which provies information on the Request used to generate the exception. Hopefully this will make for much more useful error messages.

Based on the feedback I've received, this should bring the default behavior for http-client into line with what people expect, and will hopefully have a minimal impact of migration for existing users relying on the current behavior.

mono-traversable

The mono-traversable package provides a typeclass hierarchy based around the idea of monomorphic containers. This allows, for examples, a unified foldMap function that works on lists, ByteStrings, and unboxed vectors, as well as abstractions over sequences (functions like break and drop) and containers (Maps and Sets).

I laid out a plan for a cleanup of the mono-traversable package. Most of the changes here were minor, and will not affect end users. Of import:

• The mono-traversable package itself has much reduced dependencies, by putting a number of instances into the new mono-traversable-instances package.
• A few typeclasses that used to live in chunked-data have moved to mono-traversable
• The Data.NonNull module is much simpler, and no longer based on Data.MinLen (which lives on in the minlen package)

classy-prelude

Mostly, classy-prelude is just inheriting the upstream changes in mono-traversable. The only other point I'd like to make about this classy-prelude release is that it is switching over to the new safe-exceptions package, which I recently announced on the FP Complete blog.

Mega repo

To simplify maintenance, and address a common problem of people not knowing which repo to report issues to, I've combined a few repos together into a mono-traversable mega-repo:

• classy-prelude (and -conduit and -yesod)
• chunked-data
• mutable-containers

I've updated the old repo locations with a final commit pointing to the new location.