Hi, On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 06:58:52PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirem...
Well, the policy can be changed if necessary (not that I'm proposing that here). While packages may need to be present to build an application in the platform, they don't necessarily need to be exposed as part of the platform.
That's true for binary packaging systems. It would not be true for source based ones e.g. gentoo, freebsd ports, macports or indeed someone starting with just ghc and using cabal to install the platform meta-package.
On the other hand, on those systems people would get all packages (libraries and programs) required by the Haskell platform, plus some additional ones. Wouldn't hurt too much, IMHO (allthough it feels a little bit wrong if the platform would contain programs that can't be built with only the platform). As I'm doing OpenBSD stuff, where things are a little bit different (we have a ports tree for building stuff from sources, *but* we also provide binary packages and recommend and expect ordinary users to use those): if OpenBSD would provide meta-packages (which it doesn't do yet), there would be a meta-package `haskell-platform' which run- and lib-dependencies on all the nice stuff required by the platform, and at the same time build-depends on stuff only required for *building* the platform. But I readlly don't know what would happen wrt shared libraries (which are supported now in GHC on most archs, AFAIK). Ciao, Kili