[Haskell-cafe] A small step towards solving cabal hell.

[Brandon Allbery]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:15 AM, <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> wrote:

> Well in some cases, it might not be easy to break up the libraries.  If
> there is sufficient mutual dependency, doing so won't even help the
> situation.  However, I already looked at the code to some large libraries,
> such as xmonad-contrib, and gtk2hs and am certain that no code
> modifications are needed for these libraries to be broken into more
> manageable "books".  Often times, like is the case with
>

There's another consideration, which is are you optimizing hackage by
pessimizing development?  You could break xmonad-contrib into (usually) one
package per module if you really wanted to --- but now the developers need
to track a couple hundred packages and possibly as many darcs or git or
whatever repos. You've just nibbled that project to death by making it too
difficult for developers to bother with.

(cabal doesn't really let you have multiple packages per source tree
currently; this would help some, but I suspect that would just expose more
shortcomings in hackage with that kind of package setup.)

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure          http://sinenomine.net
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