[Hs-Generics] Developing SYB, packaging issues

[Sean Leather]

Hi Pedro,

To be able to further develop SYB (see [1] for history), it's probably best
> to develop it as a separate package, which people can install, upgrade, etc.
> This would mean the library could be updated independently of GHC, and new
> GHC releases could then use the most recent version of the package.
>

Agreed. We talked about this offline, but I wanted to chime in with a +1
here. Just as it would help the GHC developers for a third party to develop
and maintain SYB, it would help the developers and users for SYB to be
distributed and available as a separate package.


> But how do these things merge? Can/should SYB be moved out of the base
> package? And, if this happens, can the library being developed as a separate
> package still use the automatic deriving mechanism?
>

I think SYB should be extracted from 'base' into a package. It seems like
the only technical thing that might prevent this extraction is the automatic
deriving of Typeable and Data. Or does it prevent it? Can anyone clarify
this?

As a side note, might this work have an impact on the Haskell Platform?

Thanks,
Sean
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