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

[timothyhobbs at seznam.cz]

I understand your concern.  Of course with cabals current implementation 
this proposal requires a lot of fluff.  I thought about implementing a cabal
syntax directly into Haskell pragmas, getting rid of the cabal file format 
entirely.  I think that would be a pie in the sky optimum.  However, I don't
think that such fluff is the death of my proposal.  Wikipedia seems 
unmaintainable after all, with so many hundreds of thousands of articles.  
Yet it is maintained by the sheer force of millions of contributors.  
Lowering the boundary for new contributors to step up and help maintain 
these new micro-packages, by shrinking and simplifying the packages, will 
solve the very problem it creates.




Timothy





---------- Původní zpráva ----------
Od: Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
Datum: 18. 11. 2012
Předmět: Re: [Haskell-cafe] A small step towards solving cabal hell.
"

On Sun, Nov 18, 2012 at 10:15 AM, <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz
(mailto: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(mailto:allbery.b at gmail.com)                             
     ballbery at sinenomine.net(mailto:ballbery at sinenomine.net)
 
unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure          http://sinenomine.net
(http://sinenomine.net)


 

"
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