On 30 March 2005 16:27, Ross Paterson wrote:

[switching to libraries]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 12:02:30PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

I don't think it's necessary to specify dependencies with module granularity. This just increases the number of possible error cases, without adding functionality. If you want to specify which module imports require each package dependency, then do it with a comment. The tools can tell you if any dependencies are redundant.

Suppose that:

- Package dependencies in Build-Depends could be specified using URLs.

That would also be redundant. Better to keep using package names in dependencies, and have a catalogue mapping package names to URLs, either in a local file or a remote database (i.e. Hackage).

I expect the default would be to look for a package in the main Hackage repository, so for example 'network' might be interpreted as shorthand for 'http://haskell.org/packages/network'. For packages not in the main Hackage repository, there needs to be an absolute URL somewhere: that can be in the .cabal file, or in a separate file if you like. If a separate file is used, then it should travel with the package, because a package should be self-contained. Cheers, Simon