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?