[Haskell-cafe] Re: Configuring cabal dependencies at install-time

[John Dorsey]

John Lato wrote:
> I think that the proper solution is to break up libraries into
> separate packages as Jeff suggests (buster, buster-ui, etc.), but then
> the total packages on hackage would explode.  I don't feel great about

I thought about this a while back and came to the conclusion that the
package count should only grow by a small contant factor due to this,
and that's a lot better than dealing with hairy and problematic
dependencies.

It should usually be:

  libfoo
  libfoo-blarg
  libfoo-xyzzy
  etc.

and more rarely:

  libbar-with-xyzzy
  libbar-no-xyzzy
  etc.

each providing libbar.  Although I don't remember whether Cabal has
'provides'.  The latter case could explode exponentially for weird
packages that have several soft dependencies that can't be managed in
the plugin manner, but I can't see that being a real issue.

This looks manageable to me, but I'm no packaging guru.  I guess it's a
little harder for authors/maintainers of packages that look like leaves
in the dependency tree, which could be bad.  Am I missing something bad?

Regards,
John