It's not base, it's base + haskell98 + haskell-src (+ network later), i.e. what the documentation calls the "Haskell Core Libraries". An alternative would be a separate directory for each of these, at the cost of a long path. But maybe a packages directory doesn't make sense until Hugs has a bit of package support.
Sounds good. I guess once we have proper packages, people won't have to tweak the search paths manually anyway so a change won't affect them.
btw Should the files in hugs98/libraries/Hugs which come from CVS be moving into the libraries repository just as there's a bunch of GHC specific stuff in libraries/GHC? (That is, should this not be a subdirectory of hugs98.)
I thought of that, but these modules are fairly closely tied to the Hugs sources, mainly via Hugs primitives.
The libraries/GHC code is quite tightly tied to GHC too. What I see happening is a gradual shift to Hugs consisting of the Hugs interpreter (C + Makefiles) in the hugs98 directory plus a bunch of jointly maintained library code (Haskell plus C/FFI) in the libraries directory - some of which is Hugs-specific and some of which is shared with GHC and NHC. We don't have to buy into this now but I think it's the way we're heading. [Hmmm, I seem to remember CVS having a way to formalize this sort of cross-hierarchial relationship.] -- Alastair