Add flip for changing import statement semantics

[SupunS]

Work towards https://github.com/onflow/flips/issues/278

[bluesign]

What are the breaking examples for this on staged contracts ? I can think of access(account) var cases as most critical ( will require setter I suppose in the current model ) , structs as references can be pretty easy to fix.

[SupunS]

@bluesign Like mentioned in the impact section, there were three contracts affected by this, and all of them were returning an imported-contract field (a dictionary) as-is, so the type annotation of the function would needed to be changed. e.g: similar to https://github.com/onflow/flips/pull/277#discussion_r1643013008. I don't quite know what the use-case of those functions are; They were not used anywhere AFAIU (did a string search in all staged contracts, but came empty).

[turbolent]

I can think of access(account) var cases as most critical ( will require setter I suppose in the current model )

Yeah, that's one of the downsides, but IMHO probably not a big deal, given the workaround is adding a setter. Adding special rules to the language for treating access(account) differently is not worth it (more rules increase the burden for users and implementors, and there is little benefit over an explicit setter function)

[bluesign]

Yeah, that's one of the downsides, but IMHO probably not a big deal, given the workaround is adding a setter.

Yeah I checked mainnet contracts now, it seems it is rarely used to modify, often used to just read.

[bjartek]

LGTM, this is a no brainer.

[austinkline]

Proposal is pretty straight-forward, a bit surprised it didn't work this way already!

:+1:

[bluesign]

LGTM

[SupunS]

For additional information, these are the fixes needed for the three breaking contracts: https://gist.github.com/SupunS/c732360df3fa969e09a161776a1af0ab

[SupunS]

We discussed this FLIP during today's developer office hours / working group call, and the sentiment was very positive, and there have not been any concerns so far. If it continues to have no any further concerns, we will consider this FLIP as approved by the EOW.

[SupunS]

Thanks everyone for the feedback! This FLIP has been open for a while, and had multiple breakout sessions for discussing the details. There has been no concerns and the feedback has been very positive. Thus, I'll consider this FLIP as approved! 🎉

You can follow the implementation progress at https://github.com/onflow/cadence/pull/3417