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The long answer I won't go into in detail, but part of the problem is that being a fptools/libraries developer basically means having a GHC development environment. That requires an investment which I'm personally not able to make at the moment.
Whilst I don't think it'll change your mind, there is a considerably easier route to being a libraries developer: use Hugs. Hugs is easy to work with, we tend to avoid complex Makefiles, we don't have umpteen different 'way's to build our libraries, recompiling is really fast, etc. Ross Paterson has been working away at making a lot of the new hierarchial libraries work with Hugs; I've added support for the latest ffi spec to Hugs; and Sigbjorn Finne has been plugging gaps in Hugs' library support where Hugs-specific code is required. The result is that it is now quite feasible to use Hugs when working on the hierarchial libraries. [Of course, I'm talking about the CVS copy of Hugs here - but this is little hardship since you'd certainly be working with the CVS copy of the libraries.] Some caveats: 1) This doesn't take away from Andrew's point about not wanting too much experimentation in the supposedly stable libraries. 2) Of course, Hugs doesn't have anything comparable to GHC's profiling infrastructure and a few other cool GHC support tools. 3) What I say is true for almost any library you want to develop. Any library that is except Unicode - Hugs still only supports 8-bit Chars. :-( -- Alastair Reid alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/