At Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:25:40 -0800, brad clawsie wrote:
so far the haskell community has taken the cpan route for most practical libs but i wonder if a "batteries included" approach might help get some key libraries to a more complete state. in particular, i would like to see support for basic internet protocols, database connectivity, and potentially xml parser support rolled into the ghc standard libs.
The recent trend has to to roll less into the ghc standard libs. There are a number of reasons for this. People complain it takes to long to build all of GHC, it makes it harder to port GHC to embedded platforms where many of the libraries are not needed or are hard to support. Libraries tend to only get updated as often as GHC (which is far to infrequent for many libraries). What if instead of rolling the libraries into GHC, they were rolled into task-specific bundles. For example, a bundle of internet libraries (http, xml, etc), a bundle of unix support libraries, etc. These bundles could be created and managed by third parties. The bundles might just be references to specific versions of packages already in hackage ? This would give you the power that comes from branding certain packages as recommended, but with (hopfully) less baggage than putting them in the GHC distribution itself? j.