[Haskell-cafe] Library Process (was Building "production stable" software in Haskell)

[Ketil Malde]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 11:14 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> I would like to see the same separation forming between the ghc compiler
> itself (which would minimally include only the small number of libraries
> needed to build the compiler), and larger "distributions" which would be
> maintained by other people, and include much larger collections of
> packages that the maintainer has tested and verified to work together.

I think there is a niche for a subset of the hackage libraries providing
an officially sanctioned standard library collection.  Currently,
hackage includes, well, everything.  As such, it is a useful resource,
but it would be useful to have a partitioning into two levels, where the
"SLC" would only include libraries that meet specific criteria.  Maybe:

 - considered stable
 - is portable
 - relies only on other standard libraries
 - avoids needless duplication of functionality
 - with a responsive, named maintainer (not libraries@)
 - with acceptable documentation and unit tests
 - required by at least one separate application

-k