[Haskell-cafe] Re: Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 4:54 PM, John MacFarlane<jgm at berkeley.edu> wrote:
[..]
> In this connection, I want to make a general point about the HP:
> In a way, it doesn't matter so much which additional pure Haskell
> libraries it includes, because once you have cabal install, you can get
> anything easily. For bindings to C libraries, it's another story.

AFAIU the plan is to separate GHC and its "platform packages", so in
the future it might not be that easy to get to the point where you
_can_ run 'cabal install'.

> pcre-light is a good example. If I want to tell someone how to install
> pandoc with syntax highlighting, I can't just say, "Get the HP and
> then cabal install pandoc -fhighlighting". I have to say: "First,
> install the pcre library, if it's not already on your system..." -- and
> you lose a lot of users at this step.

This is a good point, but to some extent this brings us back to a
discussion that's specific to systems with broken or non-existing
package managers.  Wouldn't it be better to deal with _that_ outside
of HP?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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