[Haskell-cafe] expanded standard lib

[Don Stewart]

andrewcoppin:

> Hackage seems like a nice idea in principle. However,

I think in practice too: we had no central lib archive or dependency
system, now we have 400 libraries, and a package installer, 10 months 
later. Until Hackage, there was a strong pressure not to reuse other 
people's libraries.

> - The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent, 
> some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
 
 1. Welcome to the internet.

> - Almost all packages seem to require a long list of dependencies.

 2. Solved with cabal:

    cabal install foo

 Resolves package deps. Reusing libraries is a good thing.

> - There seems to be an awful lot of packages that do the same thing but 
> with incompatible interfaces (and varying limitations). It seems we're 
> not very coordinated here.

 See #1.

> - (And, since I'm on Windows, I can't seem to get anything to install 
> with Cabal...)

 3. Report a bug. We need more developers on windows, for window to
 improve.

-- Don