Message: 10
Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2010 09:42:33 +1100
From: Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint
To: "Bryan O'Sullivan" <bos@serpentine.com>
Cc: libraries <libraries@haskell.org>
Message-ID:
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On 8 November 2010 08:35, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos@serpentine.com> wrote:
> Hlint isn't a library, right? And as an application, it presumably doesn't for any practical reason need its dependencies in the platform in order to itself be included?

As I stated earlier, the policy seems to state that they do need to be
there (to be able to build the platform if nothing else):
http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirements

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.  Rationale-8.5 seems to be targeted at libraries specifically.  That is, it claims there's no technical means to differentiate between blessed and non-blessed packages, which is why non-blessed packages can't be included.  But since an application doesn't expose libraries, there is a simple means to make this distinction.

If you think of an application in the HP as maintaining a private fork of non-HP libraries, it makes sense.  Of course, this also brings up one of my concerns.  That is, the potential for future maintenance of depended-upon libraries should be considered as part of potential for maintenance of the application as a whole.  If the libraries are already part of HP this is simpler.

For HLint specifically, my personal opinion is that library dependencies shouldn't prevent hlint's inclusion in the HP.  I'm confident that haskell-src-exts will continue to be well-maintained (and I'm glad to see that it's working towards HP inclusion as well), and since Neil maintains both uniplate and hlint I don't have any concern there.

John Lato