base package (Was: GHC 7.8 release?)

[Ian Lynagh]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 07:32:06PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> 
> I have started a wikipage with the list of all modules from base, for a
> first round of shuffling, grouping and brainstorming:
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SplitBase

Great, thanks for taking the lead on this!

> > > > The disadvantage is that, at some point between the first release and
> > > > the release that removes base, each package will have to have its
> > > > dependencies updated.
> > > 
> > > Why remove base? If it is just a list of dependencies and list of
> > > modules to be re-exported, then keeping it (but advocate that it should
> > > not be used) should not be too much a burden.
> > 
> > * Any package using it doesn't benefit from the reduced version bumps,
> >   so we do actually want packages to move away from it
> 
> We want them to do so. We should not force them (most surely will...)

A lot of packages won't react until something actually breaks.

(and I suspect many are unmaintained and unused, and won't react even
once it does break).

> > * Even though base (probably) wouldn't require a lot of work at any one
> >   time, it would require a little work every now and again, and that
> >   adds up to a lot of work
> 
> Hopefully it is just updating the set of modules to be exported, sounds
> like it could be automated, given a list of packages.
> 
> > * Any time a module is added to one of the new packages, either we'd
> >   have to spend time adding it to base too, or packages continuing to
> >   use base wouldn't (easily) be able to use that new module.
> 
> Hence we should add them; shouldn’t be too much work.

I realised that there's actually no reason that the new 'base' package
has to come with GHC (even immediately after the break-up); it can just
be a package on Hackage (and, if desired, in the Haskell Platform).

So it could easily be maintained by someone else, and thus be not much
work for you, and 0 work for me  :-)


Thanks
Ian