[Haskell] URLs in haskell module namespace

[Lemmih]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 22:06:25 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time), S.
Alexander Jacobson <alex at alexjacobson.com> wrote:
> Lemmih,
> 
> The current Haskell/Cabal module and packaging system is substantially
> annoying for the typical non-sysadmin end-user.  In particular, if
> they move their code to another machine they have to do a bunch of
> different administrivia including:
> 
>    1. knowing the source package for each module used in their code
>       even if they didn't insall the packages in the first place i.e.
>       import Foo.Bar just worked on my development machine.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you're saying but knowing
the exact URL for every single module import seems more of a hassle
than installing a few packages. You could perhaps even make a shell
script containing 'cabal-get install package1 package2 ...'.

>    2. knowing the current location of those packages even if they
>       didn't obtain them for installation on the original machine
>       where they used them and aren't on the mailing list for them.

I assume you meant something like "The developer don't know where to
find the packages".
The location of the packages is irrelevant to the developer since it's
handled by Cabal/Hackage.

>    3. going through the hassle of doing a "cabal-get install" for each
>       of them once they have figured it all out.

See the above mentioned shell script or cabalize your software.

> I'd rather have a system that takes care of 1-3 for me and just
> reports errors if particular modules are irretrievable.
> 
> That being said, Cabal definitely solves a lot of problems that my
> original proposal left unaddressed (e.g. producing executables needed
> to build modules, handling C code, versioning?).  Perhaps the correct
> answer is to import Cabal packages rather than haskell source e.g.
> 
>    import http://package.org/package-1.0.cabal#Foo.Bar as Baz
>    import http://package.org/package-2.0.cabal#Foo.Bar as Baz2
>        --note use of HTTP fragment identifier for module name

Requiring Haskell implementations to honor this would be very bad,
IMHO. A preprocessor which looks for package pragmas ({- USE
somepackage -} perhaps) and install those packages via Cabal would be
way easier to hack. But then again, a small script to fetch the
packages or a .cabal file would be even simpler.

> And a big bonus here is we get a simple solution to the problem of
> Haskell's global module namespace. 

There was a problem with module name spaces? Wouldn't there only be a
problem if two packages used the same module name for different
functionality?

> Now module namespace is local to
> individual packages.
> 
> If cabal also has a "cabal-put package MyPackage http://myhost.com/dir"
> then we have a really simple and beautiful system for sharing
> libraries over the Internet as well!

This is essentially what Hackage does.

> If the change of import syntax is blessed by the powers that be, would
> it be hard to adapt Cabal to work like this?

Extending the Haskell syntax to include something which could easily
be handled by a preprocessor would be inadvisable.

> -Alex-
> 
> ______________________________________________________________
> S. Alexander Jacobson tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com
> 


-- 
Friendly,
  Lemmih