On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 11:11 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
FYI: Haskell's OpenGL binding has just been dropped from GHC's extralibs, which means that it will no longer be kept in sync with GHC development, at least not by GHC HQ.
GHC HQ has its hands full and -generally speaking - extralibs are to be replaced by H(L)P, the Haskell (Library) Platform:
As someone who uses HOpenGL as a component for my own research, I must say that I don't entirely follow the logic of dropping it from extralibs.
I mean, I fully appreciate that ghc-HQ wants to remove extralibs from its sphere of responsibility. And I also very much support the new Haskell Platform idea.
But I did also get the impression that the HP was going to start from extralibs and build outwards. I can't see how dropping existing working and tested libraries from a mini-platform, is any help at all to the new maintainers of HP.
I think there's been a bit too much ho ha over this. For one thing it was only a suggestion to reduce work and for another we've not even got the infrastructure set up so we don't know how much work it's going to be. If someone wants to do the work (of the maintainer) then I'm sure it'll happen, and judging by the number of responses that would seem likely.
It is only likely to give grief to users who expect HOpenGL to be part of HP, and then later more grief to the HP maintainers when they try to re-integrate it, after allowing it to suffer a period of bit-rot.
I don't think that's right. The HP maintainers are not (and cannot be) the maintainers of each individual package. That just does not scale. If a package is suffering bit rot then it's the responsibility of the package maintainer(s) to sort out. Also, something not being in the platform does not at all imply bit rot. Lack of a maintainer tends to imply bit rot. It's still on hackage and has its existing users who would hopefully contribute fixes if the maintainer was not to be found. Duncan