Isaac Jones writes:

Here are some suggestions on how you might proceed usefully and give us some time to come up with a plan for a build system

- collect the libraries that are already included with various compilers and see what the differences are both in what libraries are included and behaviors of the libraries

Are you aware that the three main compilers (GHC, nhc98 and Hugs) are all working from the same set of library sources these days? In the CVS repository on cvs.haskell.org, in the directory fptools/libraries, are the libraries that GHC, Hugs and nhc98 are all shipped with. These libraries are maintained by various people. They follow the guidelines in the library document: http://www.haskell.org/hierarchical-modules/libraries/libraries.html I doubt that we want to replace these libraries with another distribution. Let's not forget: the problem which originally prompted this discussion is that this set of libraries is about as large as we can reasonably distribute with the compilers. The idea was to develop a build/distribution system to make it easier for third-party library developers to distribute their work, without relying on the compiler developers to do it.

- find orphaned libraries (ala Numeric Quest) and try to find the authors to give them licenses.

- some documentation for standards lightly based on the libraries currently included w/ compilers.

The document I referred to above has guidelines for library design.

These will probably want to include some reference to various licenses.

The document I referred to above has a section on licenses. Cheers, Simon