base libraries

[Simon Marlow]

Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> ross:
>> On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 01:17:19AM +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
>>> I know Bulat is investigating this, are the GHC team/Igloo aiming to
>>> split up base with any particular target timeframe?
>>
>> It would be possible to split off bytestring, containers,
>> prettyprinting and printf now (though some of them would still be in
>> GHC's core, as they're used by Cabal).  Splitting the rest is more
>> complicated than picking GHC.*, as there are many interdependencies.
>> But we could do the easy part now.
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 03:35:49AM +0300, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
>>> in particular, my hottest hope is that ghc 6.6.1 will be shipped
>>> with fps 0.8 as separate library that will provide both backward
>>> compatibility with 6.6 and will allow to upgrade fps without
>>> recompiling ghc itself :D
>>
>> This would be a violation of the "no interface changes in minor
>> releases" rule (though at the package level rather than the module
>> level, assuming the split fps was core), but I think there's a
>> strong argument for it, since development of this package is
>> continuing outside base.
>
> I'd be ok with this.
>
> I'm interested in SimonM's opinion, as he was interested in adding it
> to base originally (to replace PackedString, and to have things in
> base use ByteStrings).

We shouldn't change anything for 6.6.1, but we can reconsider for 6.8.  If we think it's unlikely that anything in base will use ByteString, or that we can extract anything that does require ByteString into separate packages, then it might make sense to separate it again.

Cheers,
        Simon