[GHC] #1338: base package breakup

[GHC]

#1338: base package breakup
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    Reporter:  simonmar          |        Owner:                  
        Type:  task              |       Status:  new             
    Priority:  normal            |    Milestone:  6.12 branch     
   Component:  libraries/base    |      Version:  6.6.1           
    Severity:  normal            |   Resolution:                  
    Keywords:                    |   Difficulty:  Unknown         
    Testcase:                    |           Os:  Unknown/Multiple
Architecture:  Unknown/Multiple  |  
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Comment (by duncan):

 Replying to [comment:29 mokus]:
 > Would it be possible to implement at least as much of this splitting as
 is needed to remove all "unsafe" operations from base?  I would very much
 like to be able to use packages as a 'unit of analysis' for a relatively
 simple library I'm working on that attempts to maintain a package database
 of "safe" packages (verified not to perform any "dangerous" IO outside the
 IO type, for example).

 I would suggest an approach using a combination of annotations and
 analysis. Certainly a package that contains only pure functions and
 depends only on other packages you've deemed to be ok, is itself ok. That
 requires no annotation, just analysis. Your problem of course is packages
 that either exports genuinely unsafe things or that uses unsafe things to
 export safe abstractions. My suggestion here is to annotate the things
 that are safe but use unsafe things internally. Of course you then need to
 "believe" the annotations, so you would want a way to specify a list of
 packages where you will trust the annotations to be correct. You don't
 need to annotate things as unsafe since all primitives are considered
 unsafe unless marked safe.

 The point is you do not need to conflate the safe/unsafe distinction with
 package boundaries.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1338#comment:33>
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