Hi Don,
So we'll always have a consistent set? This would be a valuable list -- no other distro aims for this, other than Debian, which aims only to support a few hundred packages.
the way I see it, Hackage represents the "known universe" of Haskell packages. That distribution can be accessed by means of Cabal. Unfortunately, build instructions for Cabal are too sophisticated to be used directly by other package managers, like Pacman, because these package managers lack the ability to install several versions of the same package at the same time. Now, our task is to map Cabal to Pacman, i.e. we find the most recent subset of Hackage that can be installed within the boundaries of Pacman. This ought to be possible in pure computation: the Cabal files contain everything we need to know. In theory, this "simple" subset of Hackage can be translated into build instructions for any number of package managers. If we can generate PKGBUILD files, chances are that we can generate build instructions for Gentoo, NixOS, FreeBSD, and whatnot else just the same. Maybe we should write a cabal2prolog converter? If we had Hackage available in Prolog, then figuring out those dependencies would be no problem at all! :-) Take care, Peter