wagnerdm@seas.upenn.edu wrote:
Right, the more I think about it, the more I recognize that extra dependencies of any kind could be a problem for xmonad-contrib. I recognize that the target audience includes non-Haskell people who can't really be expected to (and shouldn't really have to) understand the Haskell library landscape. On the other hand, the library landscape is there precisely so that people who do know Haskell can use it. =)
I don't think that common libraries such as parsec would be that much of a problem as a dependency. Almost all users install xmonad either via cabal-install or their package manager. In the first case, cabal will take care of the extra dependencies without any required user interaction. If the user uses the package manager, it should be up to the maintainers to also provide a package for, say, parsec, which is not that much to ask, when the package is widely used, as it is the case with parsec. Also, such a package would not take that much effort to create, since cabalised Haskell packages don't differ much in terms of installation and they already packaged xmonad, so it should be just a matter of changing a few URLs in the package building process. If the maintainers provide such packages, it would be no more trouble for the user than installing another "ordinary" package as a dependency.