Wolfgang Thaller
Great Work!
A few questions:
How will the Library Infrastructure itself be distributed? Will it be distributed separately? Or can it be included with Haskell implementations?
That is a good question because if there weren't an answer, it would imply a bootstrapping problem. Its actually answered under the "Use Cases" (section 5) for the Haskell Implementation [1] authors: "Include the Distribution module with the Haskell Implementations (in exchange, we can hopefully remove some libraries that are currently included with the Haskell Implementations)." I'm hoping that the Implementations (and their configuration settings) can be used as bootstrap configuration for the Distribution module (like where configuration files should go, in /etc or /Library/Preferences or whatever). So this brings up the question: won't certain things like haskell-config (section 4.4) need to be distributed with the implementations as well? Yes! And what if one implementation is installed already and you go to install another one? It'll probably have to try to find haskell-config, and if it can't, assume that its the only / first implementation being installed. If it finds haskell-config, then it'll probably want to ask haskell-config where to look for packages.conf. These issues are indeed a little thorny, but I think that if the implementations can configure haskell-config as a bootstrapping step in the configuration process, then they can use pretty generic code for querying haskell-config for the rest of the configuration questions related to packaging. peace, isaac [1] implementation == compiler or interpreter