On Mon, 2007-11-19 at 10:25 -0800, brad clawsie wrote:
i would categorize myself as a purely practical programmer. i enjoy using haskell for various practical tasks and it has served me reliably. one issue i have with the library support for practical problem domains is the half-finished state of many fundamental codebases such as networking and database support.
So far I am pretty happy with the progress we've been making with hackage. It has massively increased the number of packages that are easily available. Most of our problems with it are down to it being successful so we now need more infrastructure to do searching and help users gauge stability, whether packages work in various circumstances etc. I think these mostly have technical solutions. That said, I think there is a place for a Haskell development platform. This should not be confused with GHC, though GHC obviously takes central place in our standard tool chain. Managing GHC releases has become increasingly difficult so we should continue the trend to reduce the size of GHC releases and not try to synchronise them with the release of every other part of our tool chain. I would like to compare this to the GNOME development platform. It has Gtk+ at it's hart but GNOME releases are not synchronised with Gtk+ releases. The GNOME development platform consists of a collection of standard packages. The collection is released on a time-based schedule, not a feature-based one. It puts a QA stamp on specific versions of its constituent packages that are known to work together. It has a procedure for getting packages included which include standards of API design and documentation. There is an infrastructure for maintaining, testing and releasing this platform. This is a model I think we should consider seriously. Duncan