On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 11:14 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
I would like to see the same separation forming between the ghc compiler itself (which would minimally include only the small number of libraries needed to build the compiler), and larger "distributions" which would be maintained by other people, and include much larger collections of packages that the maintainer has tested and verified to work together.
I think there is a niche for a subset of the hackage libraries providing an officially sanctioned standard library collection. Currently, hackage includes, well, everything. As such, it is a useful resource, but it would be useful to have a partitioning into two levels, where the "SLC" would only include libraries that meet specific criteria. Maybe: - considered stable - is portable - relies only on other standard libraries - avoids needless duplication of functionality - with a responsive, named maintainer (not libraries@) - with acceptable documentation and unit tests - required by at least one separate application -k