John Lato wrote:
I think that the proper solution is to break up libraries into separate packages as Jeff suggests (buster, buster-ui, etc.), but then the total packages on hackage would explode. I don't feel great about
I thought about this a while back and came to the conclusion that the package count should only grow by a small contant factor due to this, and that's a lot better than dealing with hairy and problematic dependencies. It should usually be: libfoo libfoo-blarg libfoo-xyzzy etc. and more rarely: libbar-with-xyzzy libbar-no-xyzzy etc. each providing libbar. Although I don't remember whether Cabal has 'provides'. The latter case could explode exponentially for weird packages that have several soft dependencies that can't be managed in the plugin manner, but I can't see that being a real issue. This looks manageable to me, but I'm no packaging guru. I guess it's a little harder for authors/maintainers of packages that look like leaves in the dependency tree, which could be bad. Am I missing something bad? Regards, John