[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: haskell-src-meta 0.1.0

Ben Millwood haskell at benmachine.co.uk
Wed Aug 18 22:43:25 EDT 2010


Hello cafe,

The haskell-src-meta package was originally written by Matt Morrow, to
provide a translation from the syntax tree parsed from String by the
haskell-src-exts package to Template Haskell's representation of
Haskell source code, making possible a variety of interesting
quasiquoters and metaprogramming.

However, while the package was still fairly embryonic and incomplete,
Matt disappeared from the haskell community, and his work no longer
compiles with the latest versions of template haskell and GHC. Many
people still had use for it, so there was some discussion about its
future in a haskell-cafe thread [1] resulting in a fork [2]. After I
and at least one other person duplicated the work of updating
haskell-src-meta, ignorant of the fork, it was decided that
maintaining forks was a less-than-ideal solution, so I volunteered to
take up maintainership of a package that had by now been untouched for
some ten months.

Hence, haskell-src-meta-0.1.0, from a new maintainer (hello!). The
functionality changes in this release are minimal, but nonzero: its
primary purpose is to let the original work be used with updated TH.
However, there have been some changes and additions since 0.0.6:

* The previously somewhat lengthy Language.Haskell.TH.Instances.Lift
is now mostly generated with template haskell using the th-lift
package.
* Contexts, kinds, bang patterns, unboxed word literals, newly
supported in template-haskell-2.4.0.0, are used where necessary.
* Use of haskell-src-exts is brought in line with newer versions.
* Thanks to a patch by Jonas Duregard, a new ToDecs class has been
added to handle cases where more than one Dec must be returned.

I don't have any big plans for future releases: there is a lot that
could do with tidying up, and some small aspects of the syntax
conversion that aren't covered, but I mostly just intend to ensure it
keeps building and that anyone with patches to contribute has a prompt
response.

How You Can Help: the easiest way is to tell me that I've put the
version constraints too tightly on some dependency or other -- I have
erred on the conservative side. Any other comments on the package in
general are appreciated too, since this is the first time I've ever
uploaded anything to Hackage. There is a github repository at
http://github.com/benmachine/haskell-src-meta if you want to submit
patches.

Yours sincerely,
Ben Millwood

[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-July/080390.html
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskell-src-meta-mwotton


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