I see a lot of discussion about header files. I see a small amount of discussion of libraries with many conflicting suggestions. I see no _conclusion_.
Ok, I can't see the conclusion either, but I seem to recall that at one stage the library specs were removed from the spec altogether and only came back again because of .NET (no, I'm not sure why they're in the C section of the FFI spec either).
From the GHC perspective they're not useful, and it would be headache to implement them if we had to. Fortunately the current spec says that they are a "hint" only, so we don't have to implement them. But that causes problems for anyone wanting to write portable FFI code: by definition, because the interpretation of the lib spec is implementation dependent, it can't be used in portable code. So really, I think it should be removed.
If the FFI spec says anything about libraries, IMHO it should say that the methods used to find and link against external libraries are implementation dependent. We as implementers can always get together and agree on a common mechanism (packages, command-line arguments, whatever) to make life easier for the punters.
ps In case it wasn't clear yesterday, I think the spec should be clear about whether C libraries live in local or global namespaces. I propose that they should be in a single global namespace. This will require no change to GHC but will require a change to Hugs' historical behaviour.
Fine by me. Cheers, Simon