[Haskell-cafe] Data.StateVar and packages sizes (Was: How to contact OpenGL package maintainer)

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Montag, den 18.04.2011, 09:39 +0200 schrieb Henning Thielemann:
> Joachim Breitner schrieb:
> > Am Sonntag, den 17.04.2011, 12:39 -0700 schrieb Jason Dagit:
> > 
> > 
> >> In this specific case, I'll do what I can to clean things up but your
> >> request makes me pause and think that the debian packaging for cabal
> >> packages is not automated enough.  As haskell developers it seems a
> >> little odd to me that we need to consider the cost of creating new
> >> packages for the sake of debian.  I like debian, so please don't take
> >> that the wrong way :)
> > 
> > the observation is correct, but unfortunately hard to change – Debian is
> > large, slow moving, and unlikely to change policies for a corner-case
> > such as Haskell libraries. 
> 
> As a user I had the impression that the packages become more and more
> divided into smaller packages (like TeX) and I found this useful, since
> I only need space for the functionality that I really use.

I have doubts that there is a relevant saving of space when putting this
code in a package of its own:

======snip========
module Data.ObjectName ( ObjectName(..) ) where
-- | An 'ObjectName' is an explicitly handled identifier for API objects, e.g. a
-- texture object name in OpenGL or a buffer object name in OpenAL.
class ObjectName a where
   -- | Generate a given number of object names, which are guaranteed to be
   -- unused. By generating the names, they become used.
   genObjectNames :: Int -> IO [a]
   -- | Make the given object names available again, declaring them as unused.
   deleteObjectNames:: [a] -> IO ()
   -- | Test if the given object name is currently in use, i.e. test if it has
   -- been generated, but not been deleted so far.
   isObjectName :: a -> IO Bool
======snip========

considering that there is a license file, a .cabal file, it will create
separate haddock data with an index.html, an alphabetical index, it will
have an entry of its own in the package file, you will have to look at
the package name when upgrading, more dependencies that cabal-install
needs to think about...

And with TeX, at least here, all the small .sty packages are then
distributed as one big thing called texlive (split into large sets such
that “humanities“, “science”, “publishing”), probably because it is too
tedious to individually package and select what package I really want.

If the trend to micro-package continues on Hackage, maybe that is what
will happening: Someone will create collections of packages, similar to
the plaform, maybe one for graphics (containing opengl, gtk2hs, etc.),
one for audio. And then distributors would have packages corresponding
to those bundles.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim Breitner
  e-Mail: mail at joachim-breitner.de
  Homepage: http://www.joachim-breitner.de
  ICQ#: 74513189
  Jabber-ID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de
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