base package (was: GHC 7.8 release?)

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> [2013-02-13 09:00:15+0000]
> It's feasible to split base, but to a first approximation what you
> end up with is base renamed to ghc-base, and then the new base
> contains just stub modules that re-export stuff from ghc-base.

It would be great to have a portable base, without any GHC-specific
stuff in it. After all, modules like Control.Monad or Data.Foldable are
pure Haskell2010.

The only obstacle I see is that ghc-base, as you call it, uses some
amount of base definitions, and so we have a loop.

How hard would it be to break this loop?

That is, either make GHC.* modules self-contained, or make base not to
depend on GHC.*?

Roman