"C.Reinke" <C.Reinke@kent.ac.uk> writes:
That includes individual libraries, developments in the hierarchical libraries (Simon M., the usual contact for this, is away;), as well as the discussions (Haskell WS & after) about library infrastructure, and your conclusions and plans. In short, anything interesting that happened on this list but may not have reached the general Haskeller yet.
Since Simon is away, I thought I would attempt to write a general introduction to the meta-activity in the libraries area (see below). However, rather than usurp his title by stealth, I am posting my summary to the libraries list so that anyone can edit/improve it. Please feel free to write a better summary and submit it to Claus! (And individuals who have been proposing infrastructural things might want to add a few more paragraphs of detail on their own contributions.) Regards, Malcolm ---- HC&A Report - Hierarchical libraries Apart from actually writing libraries that do stuff, recent meta-activity in the libraries community has concentrated on plans for making libraries easier to install, to distribute, to maintain, and therefore also easier to write and contribute to Haskellers at large. Isaac Jones <ijones@syntaxpolice.org> has been leading the effort in bringing together a proposal for a common distribution/installation mechanism. The aim is for a general framework that can be re-used by anyone wanting to contribute a library, so that they can be sure it will work uniformly across all the compilers/interpreters without too much effort. It covers such areas as automated configure/build, library registration, dependencies on other library packages, and automatic re-installation when a compiler version is updated. Meanwhile, the two Simons at GHC-HQ have been proposing an improved 'package' mechanism for the compilers/interpreters themselves. This proposal aims to create a more flexible 'backend' for library usage, such that libraries can be re-located within the hierarchy, and different versions of a library can co-exist together. In other recent news, the common 'base' package of libraries has recently been subdivided to separate off non-core functionality, making the core more stable, whilst enabling independent evolution of the other libraries. The split-off packages include parsec, QuickCheck, and the monad transformers. Other packages resident in the haskell.org CVS tree include OpenGL, GLUT, HaXml, Japi (Java API), ObjectIO, Win32, X11, HGL (Haskell Graphics Library), haskell-src, network, readline, and unix. ----