Simon Peyton-Jones writes:
Step 1 : identify coordinator Step 2 : propose designs, discuss, evolve consensus Step 3 : implement
My message only concerned step 1. Yours is about step 2. Which is excellent, but it *isn't* do-or-die time for step 2.
Sorry, my wording was probably misleading. I didn't mean any disrespect or opposition to Isaac Jones. The comment was purely meant along the lines of: "Peter, you have been thinking about this for weeks, so get it done already!" Ketil Z. Malde writes:
It seems to me that binary packages should be mostly optional, and can be deferred to the compiler developers to snarf from the "hslibs" (stable) hierarchy and include at their leisure?
I agree. Binary packages are can of worms. I remember when boost.org tried to come up with a way to build and install them, and the effort more or less failed, because designing an OS-independent mechanism is incredibly hard. They ended up writing a complete build system of their own (bjam) and today (2 years later) it still cannot do the equivalent of "make install". That's of course no reason it couldn't be done anyway, but it's definitely not a trivial task. And it doesn't end with building and installing: You want to have automated regression testing, generation of documentation from varying input formats, and so on, and so forth. So if we can get along without building the library ourselves at all, it will make our life much easier -- and I'm sure most developers won't care anyway. I, for one, do prefer source codes, like Ketil does. Peter