Simon Peyton-Jones
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/PackageReorg
I'd be interested to know whether the proposal has general support;
Yes, it has my general support. The proposed terminology is good.
what goals are omitted;
Possibly the following are just more detailed expansions of the existing two goals: * Forwards compatibility. Users would like their programs written against the 'core' packages to continue to work, without modification to source text or build system, after upgrading the compiler, or its packages, or switching to a different compiler. * Backwards compatibility. Users would like to be able to take a program written against some version of the 'core' packages, and build it with an older compiler, accepting that they may have to install newer versions of the 'core' packages in order to do so. It may not be possible to fully achieve these goals (in particular the latter), but that does not mean we should not aim for them. Regards, Malcolm