base package -- goals

[Ian Lynagh]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 02:25:03PM +0000, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | I added a Goals section to
> | http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SplitBase
> 
> Thanks.  But the first goal, which is the dominant one, is very unclear to me as my comments mentioned.  A description of what the problem is, and why a simple "API wrapper" approach would not solve it, would be useful.

On the wiki page you say:

    SPJ: But that goal needs a bit of unpacking. Suppose we divided base
    into six, base1, base2, base3, etc, but each was a vertical silo and
    every other package depended on all six. Then nothing would be gained;
    bumping any of them would cause a ripple of bumps down the line. 

but even if we did just divide base up into vertical silos then I don't
think most packages would depend on them all; for example, most packages
would probably not depend on file-io or concurrency.

But in any case, I'd hope we would also make some horizontal cuts, and I
expect very few packages would need to depend on ghc-io-manager etc.


Thanks
Ian