On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Vincent Hanquez
On 09/11/2012 07:27 PM, Ben Millwood wrote:
As an aside, the major reason I support HTTP over something like http-conduit is the latter's titanic dependency list. I think especially as a dependency of cabal-install that's something of a dealbreaker:
$ cabal install http-conduit | grep 'new package' | wc -l [...] 47
I'm not sure what do you want to demonstrate here, number of packages couldn't be a more irrelevant metric. Would you prefer a package that includes everything in one giant codebase ?
Sorry, I realise in retrospect that my original message was misleading, I should have been more clear: http-conduit is a great package and I would recommend it for /most/ HTTP applications. But there is virtue to having an /alternative/ that is much less capable but much less heavyweight in terms of the things it needs. Especially since some people will want to install cabal-install without already /having/ cabal-install, using the bootstrap script, which needs to manually download and install the entire transitive dependency list. Imagine if that was 47 packages! The way that http-conduit is designed and built is definitely correct. It should be in many small packages so that it can be reused. But HTTP with a lightweight dependency list also has its place.