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

[Max Rabkin]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Magnus Therning<magnus at therning.org> wrote:
>>
>> AIUI, on systems with working package managers, HP will be a
>> metapackage which depends on the appropriate "real" packages.
>
> Yes, but again, the role of HP shouldn't be to limit the pain of installing
> bindings to C libraries.  What I'm saying is that it's a worthwhile goal to
> limit that pain, but it should be handled outside of HP.

How could one do that? On systems with package managers, the platform
won't bundle C libraries, but depend on them (this is correct: if
software does in fact depend on a C library, it should declare that
dependency). On systems without package managers, we could provide
some form of "sub-platform" containing C libraries or a system for
installing them, but then installing a Haskell system is no longer a
one-step process.

It's been a while since I was a regular Windows user, but it seemed
then that bundling dependencies was the most common (only?) solution.

> /M

--Max