On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Magnus Therning
AIUI, on systems with working package managers, HP will be a metapackage which depends on the appropriate "real" packages.
Yes, but again, the role of HP shouldn't be to limit the pain of installing bindings to C libraries. What I'm saying is that it's a worthwhile goal to limit that pain, but it should be handled outside of HP.
How could one do that? On systems with package managers, the platform won't bundle C libraries, but depend on them (this is correct: if software does in fact depend on a C library, it should declare that dependency). On systems without package managers, we could provide some form of "sub-platform" containing C libraries or a system for installing them, but then installing a Haskell system is no longer a one-step process. It's been a while since I was a regular Windows user, but it seemed then that bundling dependencies was the most common (only?) solution.
/M
--Max