Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Axel Simon]

Hi Simon et al.,

On Aug 4, 2009, at 13:57, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:

> Simon Marlow wrote:
>
>> By bringing gtk2hs into the platform, we would be giving the gtk2hs
>> maintainers a helpful boost; they'd get more testing for one thing.
>
> I think that should explicitly not be a reason to bring things into  
> the
> platform.


Bringing Gtk2Hs into the platform is certainly desirable. During the  
last one or two years, the  amount of users has grown steadily which  
is nice. However, Pete and my time is rather limited and is often  
being used up by installation issues and questions that could be  
answered with better documentation. Thus, it would be desirable to  
bring Gtk2Hs into the platform because it would force us to simplify  
installation and documentation.

For the former part, I wonder if cabalization is important for  
Gtk2Hs. A cabalized version of Gtk2Hs would allow people to use Cairo  
and Pango to create PDF documents without the need to install the GUI  
parts of the library. On the contrary, if Gtk2Hs is shipped with the  
platform, then all libraries are available anyway and cabalization  
might not be as important.

My question: how important is cabalization for a package that wants  
to be part of the platform?

Axel.