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

[Mark Wotton]

Nice work, Ben - good to see someone's going to take it on in a
slightly less half-arsed way than I was :)

cheers
mark

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Ben Millwood <haskell at benmachine.co.uk> wrote:
> 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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