2012/11/22 Simon Peyton-Jones
Having GHC support multiple copies of the same package/version would certainly be a step in the right direction. It still wouldn't completely address the goals I'm getting at in my blog post. What I'm really aiming for overall is to provide users with a stable, vetted set of packages that are known to work well together. But for those of us who will still be using plain Hackage, this improvement would be very helpful.
Indeed. I’ve always thought of the Haskell Platform as doing the “stable set” part, though there must be plenty of space between HP at one end and Hackage at the other, and that’s what you are exploring I think.
Regardless, being able to install multiple instantiations of the same package/version is desirable for the “stable set” story, so that more than one stable set is possible; and so that trying to use a package outside the stable set doesn’t mess up your stable-set installation.
The question is: who will do the work?
Duncan said on reddit you mentionned to him Kickstarter as a possible venue (http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/12e3a0/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugl...). He mentioned a minimum of around $50k. I think it would be interesting to gauge interest on the haskell mailing list or on reddit to see if such an amount would be possible. Cheers, Thu