Re: packages with orphaned instances only

Stephen Tetley schrieb:

On 7 January 2011 10:22, Christian Maeder wrote:

...

So is this a bad idea?

It sounds like a good idea to me.

There might be some details to trash out, e.g. the granularity of packages - should there be a Quickcheck-orphans with Arbitrary instances for many structures, or separate packages (quickcheck-containers-instances, quickcheck-array-instances, ...) and perhaps a new top-level Hackage category is needed so people know where to find them - "Canonical instances", "Orphan instances", ...?

Since instances are always canonical (since you cannot safely have multiple instance laying around), I vote for 'Orphan instances'. We should explain this e.g. in http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_write_a_Haskell_program