Hi Folks, It has occurred to us that the GHC community really needs an infrastructure (i.e. like a build system, but more) that people can use for shipping their own libraries independently of GHC. Several people have asked recently if they can ship their libraries with GHC - for a while we were quite receptive to this, but GHC is getting rather "heavy" both in terms of build time and maintenance effort, and we feel it's time to cut back a bit. But we don't want to leave library developers out in the cold. Suppose we had an infrastructure which someone could plug their library source code into, and immediately get - a source tarball which will configure/build/install on a Unix/cygwin system with GHC installed, and provide a GHC package when installed. - skeleton binary packages for RPM, Windows installer, *BSD ports, Gentoo ebuild, etc. The binary packages will require some programmer intervention (such as setting the dependencies correctly), but much of the work can be done automatically. Furthermore, we'd provide links to compatible library packages from the GHC web pages. It doesn't particularly matter whether fptools is used as a starting point, or we pick another existing build system or start from scratch. The important thing is that someone who wants to ship a library can pick up this infrastructure and quickly provide all the above functionality with very little extra work. Comments? Cheers, Simon