Hi, Am Montag, den 25.02.2013, 11:25 -0800 schrieb Johan Tibell:
1. I'd like to have text Handles use the Text type and binary Handles use the ByteString type. Right now we have this somewhat awkward setup where the I/O APIs are spread out and bundled with pure types. Splitting base would let us fix this and write a better I/O layer.
2. The I/O manager currently has a copy of IntMap inside its implementation because base cannot use containers. Splitting base would let us get rid of this code duplication.
added to http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SplitBase It would be interesting to see if Text and Bytestring (without the file IO parts) can be compiled using the base-foreign package extracted here https://github.com/nomeata/packages-base/tree/base-split/base-foreign. Looking at the imports, it seems possible. Then a base-io-system package can indeed depend on text and bytestring, and provide the appropriately typed file IO functions there. The containers package looks like a good example for a package that sits on base-pure: No IO, no FFI. So with the split suggested in my branch, having the ghc-io-system depend on containers seems possible.
I'm less interested in having super fine-grained dependencies in my libraries. More packages usually means more busy-work managing dependencies. Taken to its extreme you could imagine having base-maybe, base-bool, and whatnot. I don't think this is an improvement. Splitting base into perhaps 3-5 packages (e.g. GHC.*, IO, pure types) should let us get a bunch of benefits without too many downsides.
This is basically the goal added by SPJ: Split base into as FEW packages as possible, consistent with meeting the other goals. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata