On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 09:57:25AM -0700, Mark Lentczner wrote:
Is it essential, or even sensical, that the serialization format GHC needs for storing package info bear any relation to the human authored form? If not, the split out of the package types could be accomplished in a way where GHC uses simple show/read(P) style serialization for storage of package info, where as cabal-lib would use a lovely parsec parser for humans. I'd like this approach.
I think it would be feasible to stop GHC itself from using the human readable format. The only place I can think of it being used is in the package database, but we could use either Read/Show for that, or just exclusively use the binary format. It would be a little less user-friendly, but maybe worth it to remove the ghc library dependencies on most-of-Cabal, mtl and parsec.
Perhaps the major cause is that because GHC is shipped as a library itself, it exposes all it's package dependencies.
Yes.
In otherwords, users that wanted to incorporate the ghc-lib into their programs would depend, and download, and configure, and build, ghc-lib indpenendant of the GHC binaries
I think this would create more problems than it solves.
Okay, perhaps that is all just fantasy. But, no other programming system operates the way we do. They all fall into one of two camps:
- The dominant implementation is maintained, built, and shipped along with a large collection of "common packages". Examples: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java. - The dominant implementation is shipped as a bare tool, and large common libraries are maintained and shipped independently. Examples: C++ (think g++ and boost), JavaScript (think browsers, and jQuery).
We are in the middle and, I think, experiencing growing pains because of it.
I would say that we are doing the first option, in the form of the HP. It's just that the core gets frozen (i.e., ghc + libs gets released) earlier than the higher level libraries. I don't think that moving (back) to trying to freeze/release everything all at once would be an improvement. You just need to remain strong, and keep saying "no" :-) (you're doing a great job, BTW!) Thanks Ian