Re: Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

On 6 November 2010 00:09, Max Bolingbroke wrote:

On 5 November 2010 09:01, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:

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Ummm... I should be able to download the GHC source tarball (or generic unix binary) + the HP source tarball and be good to go from there.

I think you have misunderstood my proposal. The platform tarball could (and should!) include the source for the "private" libraries. I am only pointing out that such private libraries do not necessarily need to be installed into the system package list in the process of installing the Haskell Platform itself.

They would still need to be approved in such a way, and if the user wants to update hlint then they would need to install those anyway. Besides, unless you do a direct source unpacking + .cabal file manipulation, I'm not sure if it's possible to have "private" libraries.

...

Anyway, it's official policy: http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirem...

I was not aware of this, thanks. However, the rationale states:

""" It may seem that it might be possible to allow shipping packages that are somehow "not blessed" as being part of the platform, however there is currently no obvious way to make a practical distinction between "blessed" and "not blessed". """

Note that this is not true in the special case that "not blessed" packages are used only by an *executable* package. So it looks like the policy could be safely relaxed to admit this special case and hence allow HLint to be included. However, it would require a policy change and I do not know who is capable of making such changes, or if this change would be acceptable.

I think it isn't technically feasible at the moment, since a library is either installed or it isn't; there's no real concept of a "build-time only" library with Cabal. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com