On Sun, 2008-11-09 at 14:59 +0000, Claus Reinke wrote:
Talking about dependencies of cabal packages:
- some packages depend on everything and the kitchen-sink, following the "ah, great, here's another package I should use" idea of what it means to provide a modern haskell package.
It would be nice if package authors would consider separate minimal and extended dependencies, the former sufficient to enable the package functionality, the latter enabled by a flag, and only needed for testing frameworks, parser re-generation, convenience, performance, ..
That's fine so long as it does not change the external api of a package.
- since Duncan has put in the work for making meta-packages possible for the Haskell Platform anyway, couldn't that be used to group typical dependencies together (eg, ghc corelibs, old extralibs, haskell platform, testing, ..), to make those dependency lists on hackage somewhat easier to comprehend?
Probably, hackage/cabal could offer some support for reducing detailed dependencies to standard dependency groups.
Yes, it'd be useful to see what are the "non-standard" deps, ie those outside of the core libs or the platform libs. Duncan