[Haskell-cafe] two problems with Data.Binary and Data.ByteString

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 15:31 -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> 
> > No, since I can get whnf with `seq`. However, that does sound like a
> > good idea (a patch to the parallel library? )
> 
> I suspect that patching parallel doesn't scale. It doesn't have a
> maintainer, so it will be slow, and the package will end up dragging
> in everything under the sun if we centralise instances in there. I
> think that the instance belongs in bytestring instead. I know that
> this would make everything depend on parallel, but that doesn't seem
> as bad a problem.

This is a general problem we have with packages and instances. Perhaps
in this specific case it wouldn't cause many problems to make bytestring
depend on parallel (though it means bytestring cannot be a boot lib and
cannot be used to implement basic IO) but in general it can be a
problem. I can't see any obvious solutions. We don't want lots of tiny
packages that just depend on two other packages and define a instance.

Duncan