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

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:05 PM, Max Rabkin<max.rabkin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Well, I'd hope that the stuff that's being built around _building_ HP
(helper scripts / procedures for putting together binary installers on
Mac and Win) is general enough so that it can be used to do a HP+ (or
a number of installers) that includes different C lib bindings.  In
essence, that would result in a set of prepared Haskell packages for
the platforms that lack a good package manager.

> 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.

I don't know of any other way either.  I just strongly oppose the idea
that HP should take on the role of providing C lib bindings just
because on some platforms it's hard to satisfy the C dependencies.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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