On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 07:32:06PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
I have started a wikipage with the list of all modules from base, for a first round of shuffling, grouping and brainstorming:
Great, thanks for taking the lead on this!
The disadvantage is that, at some point between the first release and the release that removes base, each package will have to have its dependencies updated.
Why remove base? If it is just a list of dependencies and list of modules to be re-exported, then keeping it (but advocate that it should not be used) should not be too much a burden.
* Any package using it doesn't benefit from the reduced version bumps, so we do actually want packages to move away from it
We want them to do so. We should not force them (most surely will...)
A lot of packages won't react until something actually breaks. (and I suspect many are unmaintained and unused, and won't react even once it does break).
* Even though base (probably) wouldn't require a lot of work at any one time, it would require a little work every now and again, and that adds up to a lot of work
Hopefully it is just updating the set of modules to be exported, sounds like it could be automated, given a list of packages.
* Any time a module is added to one of the new packages, either we'd have to spend time adding it to base too, or packages continuing to use base wouldn't (easily) be able to use that new module.
Hence we should add them; shouldn’t be too much work.
I realised that there's actually no reason that the new 'base' package has to come with GHC (even immediately after the break-up); it can just be a package on Hackage (and, if desired, in the Haskell Platform). So it could easily be maintained by someone else, and thus be not much work for you, and 0 work for me :-) Thanks Ian