base package -- goals

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Montag, den 25.02.2013, 11:25 -0800 schrieb Johan Tibell:
>  1. I'd like to have text Handles use the Text type and binary Handles
> use the ByteString type. Right now we have this somewhat awkward setup
> where the I/O APIs are spread out and bundled with pure types.
> Splitting base would let us fix this and write a better I/O layer.
> 
> 
>  2. The I/O manager currently has a copy of IntMap inside its
> implementation because base cannot use containers. Splitting base
> would let us get rid of this code duplication. 

added to http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SplitBase

It would be interesting to see if Text and Bytestring (without the file
IO parts) can be compiled using the base-foreign package extracted here
https://github.com/nomeata/packages-base/tree/base-split/base-foreign.
Looking at the imports, it seems possible. Then a base-io-system package
can indeed depend on text and bytestring, and provide the appropriately
typed file IO functions there.

The containers package looks like a good example for a package that sits
on base-pure: No IO, no FFI. So with the split suggested in my branch,
having the ghc-io-system depend on containers seems possible.

> I'm less interested in having super fine-grained dependencies in my
> libraries. More packages usually means more busy-work managing
> dependencies. Taken to its extreme you could imagine having
> base-maybe, base-bool, and whatnot. I don't think this is an
> improvement. Splitting base into perhaps 3-5 packages (e.g. GHC.*, IO,
> pure types) should let us get a bunch of benefits without too many
> downsides.

This is basically the goal added by SPJ: Split base into as FEW packages
as possible, consistent with meeting the other goals.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata

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