Rustom,

I am drafting a document that captures some of the social norms from the comments on this list, mostly from Brandon and Wren. I have captured the discussion about module namespace and am sorting out the comments on the relationship between libraries and packages.

My initial question to the list was to try an identify where Haskell is different from other open source distributions. From what I can tell, the issues are very similar. The module name space seems to have characteristics very similar to the include file hierarchy of linux distributions.

If you have some spare cycles and would like to contribute, I think everyone would appreciate your help and effort

Gregg

On 5/23/2012 4:24 AM, Rustom Mody wrote:
On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 7:29 PM, Gregg Lebovitz <glebovitz@gmail.com> wrote:


On 4/23/2012 10:17 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 17:16, Gregg Lebovitz <glebovitz@gmail.com> wrote:
On 4/23/2012 3:39 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
The other dirty little secret that is carefully being avoided here is the battle between the folks for whom Haskell is a language research platform and those who use it to get work done.  It's not entirely inaccurate to say the former group would regard a fragmented module namespace as a good thing, specifically because it discourages people from considering it to be stable....
Brandon, I find that a little hard to believe.  If the issues are similar to other systems and languages, then  I think it is more likely that no one has volunteered to work on it.  You volunteering to help?


Does haskell/hackage have something like debian's lintian?

Debian has a detailed policy document that keeps evolving: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
Lintian tries hard to automate (as much as possible) policy-compliance http://lintian.debian.org/manual/index.html

Eg how packages should use the file system
 http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/
Even 'boring' legal stuff like license-checking is somewhat automated http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/

And most important is the dos and donts for package dependency making possible nice pics http://collab-maint.alioth.debian.org/debtree/

Of course as Wren pointed out, the Linux communities have enough manpower to police their distributions which haskell perhaps cannot.

My question is really: Would not something like a haskell-lintian make such sanity checking easier and more useful for everyone?