I wonder if it would be useful to be able to download and use only necessary modules from Hackage. This way if someone writes, say a superior XML parsing API, and someone else has better generating API, the user can pull just those modules , write the glue and have the best of both worlds.

On the upside this would:
1. Make for a smaller local cabal repository.
2. Mitigate the problem of having to compile a package that has functionality you don't need. MissingH [1] is a good example.
3. Allow you to continue working even if one of the modules doesn't compile. I recently ran into this with liboleg [2] where I only wanted Control.CCCXe, but couldn't "cabal install" it on my system because one of the other modules failed to compile.

-deech

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/MissingH-1.1.0.3
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/liboleg

On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Julian Porter <julian.porter@porternet.org> wrote:
>  ultimately the ideal is to end up with one library that solves the problem well, which everybody can use.
>
>
 Nonsense.  One library that everyone can use with either end up being so small in functionality that it's actually useless, or so general that either it requires tons and tons of boilerplate just to use it at all, or it's really about eight libraries rolled into one and so impossible to find your way around.  Whichever, it's not good.  The sweet spot is at the point of maximum tension between generality and simplicity.
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