On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 7:46 PM, Matthias Kilian
Hi,
http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirem...
Well, the policy can be changed if necessary (not that I'm proposing
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
On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 06:58:52PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote: that platform.
That's true for binary packaging systems. It would not be true for source based ones e.g. gentoo, freebsd ports, macports or indeed someone starting with just ghc and using cabal to install the platform meta-package.
On the other hand, on those systems people would get all packages (libraries and programs) required by the Haskell platform, plus some additional ones. Wouldn't hurt too much, IMHO (allthough it feels a little bit wrong if the platform would contain programs that can't be built with only the platform).
I think this was exactly the situation rationale 8.5 means to avoid. I do think it would be technically possible to make this work, but only by greatly increasing the maintenance cost for HP (I underestimated this cost originally). It's probably not a good trade-off. If cabal supported something like run-time-specified repos it would be much simpler. John