"Simon Peyton-Jones"
These both raise a common question: how can someone distribute a library? (This is a different question to the library-infrastructure question about how to build a library, which we've been discussing recently.) [..] OK so that's the idea.
1. Does it seem like a reasonable idea?
2. There is a pressing need for the first Contrib Builder for libraries like Dominic's crypto and Koen's Chunk library. Any volunteers? Even for one implementation target?
Languages like Perl and Python face the similar problems as we do, although they have less language implementations to worry about (at least for Python, there is more than one implementation). So, the question is whether we can't more or less follow their lead. Perl is certainly extremely successful at establishing itself by way of a flourishing libraries community. I don't know many details of how the Perl community works, but here are what seem to be core points: * Well-known central repository: CPAN http://www.cpan.org/ * Binary distributions of library packages can be obtained independent of the main system. CPAN has something called Perl Ports. On my RedHat 8.0 system, grepping for Perl packages leads to the appended result. To facilitate this, it would probably be worthwhile to have some infrastructure that makes it easy for a library author to make a new library portable across operating systems and Haskell implementations (and their associated build and package systems). If this were really simple, we might not need to agglomerate unrelated libraries into random contrib packages. I don't really have much of a concrete idea of how such an infrastructure should look like, but maybe somebody else has. Cheers, Manuel -=- AttitudeAdjuster chak 608 (~): rpm -qa |grep perl perl-Storable-1.0.14-15 perl-DateManip-5.40-27 perl-XML-Dumper-0.4-22 perl-Inline-0.43-7 perl-5.8.0-55 perl-SGMLSpm-1.03ii-6 perl-libwww-perl-5.65-2 groff-perl-1.18-6 perl-suidperl-5.8.0-55 openssl-perl-0.9.6b-33 perl-Filter-1.28-9 perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-14 perl-XML-Parser-2.31-12 perl-libxml-enno-1.02-25 gimp-perl-1.2.3-9 perl-Parse-Yapp-1.05-26 perl-libxml-perl-0.07-25 perl-XML-Grove-0.46alpha-21 perl-PDL-2.3.2-10 perl-URI-1.21-3 perl-XML-Twig-3.05-3 perl-CGI-2.81-55 perl-CPAN-1.61-55 perl-HTML-Tagset-3.03-25 perl-XML-Encoding-1.01-20 perl-DB_File-1.804-55