wither the Platform

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2015-03-25 at 06:52:22 +0100, Mark Lentczner wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 8:20 PM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> install Yesod, or GHCJS, or Yesod and then GHCJS, and then some package
>> with an API binding for some webservice which has not been updated in two
>> years and requires an old version of time, and then maybe a GUI toolkit and
>> of course lens.
>
> That sounds like a recipe for Cabal Hell, Platform or not!

Regardless of the hellish issue, Gershom's comment indirectly highlights
of one thing where I'm wondering if the HP's growth isn't bounded by
diversity:

There are some areas which I'd expected to some degree in a
batteries-included platform, where the Haskell ecosystem has diverged
into popular but distinct package-sub-ecosystems (which all have their
respective communities/followers), such as HTTP-serving
(Yesod/Snap/Happstack/...), or which lens-abstraction to use, or at the
more fundamental level, even the streaming abstraction
(pipes/conduit/io-streams/machines/...) doesn't seem to have a clearly
recommended and agreed upon representative.

Also, to this day we don't have any TLS library support in the platform,
which also is subject to debate of which crypto-library to use (and
there's also the question whether to use OpenSSL via FFI or a native TLS
reimpl). So the platform-included `HTTP` package is not even able to
access `https://` URLs which is quite sad, as this also holds back
`cabal-install`'s ability to access `https://`-only repositories.

So, where do you see the platform's growth for those packages/areas
where you'll probably not get a reasonable majority consensus for
picking a specific package?

Cheers,
  hvr