Re: [Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

Justin Bailey wrote:

On Nov 19, 2007 10:25 AM, brad clawsie wrote:

...

so far the haskell community has taken the cpan route for most practical libs but i wonder if a "batteries included" approach might help get some key libraries to a more complete state. in particular, i would like to see support for basic internet protocols, database connectivity, and potentially xml parser support rolled into the ghc standard libs. there is always a strong debate on where the line is

I agree strongly. I particularly miss a "standard" HTTP library.

Personally, I miss clean binary I/O, configurable character encodings, and an "easy" API for working with bitmapped images (loading them, saving them, displaying them, etc.) I could also reel off a whole bunch of other stuff I'd like to have - but that doesn't write the code, does it? Hackage seems like a nice idea in principle. However, - The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent, some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more). - Almost all packages seem to require a long list of dependencies. - There seems to be an awful lot of packages that do the same thing but with incompatible interfaces (and varying limitations). It seems we're not very coordinated here. - (And, since I'm on Windows, I can't seem to get anything to install with Cabal...) Unfortunately, while it's very easy to point out failings in a given system, it's much harder to propose viable ways to fix things... :-(