[Haskell] Re[2]: base libraries

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Simon,

Friday, November 24, 2006, 1:58:36 PM, you wrote:

>     There are several interconnected issues, which makes this hard to discuss on
> a mailing list.

i hardly imagine how it can be discussed on wiki :)

>    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/PackageReorg

thanks, it's much closer to my POV. still some problems exists. first,
this proposal don't realize problems with upgrading libraries used by
Cabal itself. is it possible to have, say, base 2.0 and 2.1 installed
side-by-side and make Cabal import just base 2.0 against which it was
written? second, rules for ghc-specific libs pops up as some
modification of initial rules, it will be better to include them in
general rules themselves. third, this don't split core libs into the
pre-installed and installed by package manager. so, my updated proposal:


Now Haskell standard libraries (as specified in H98 Report) are very
small and old-fashioned, it's impossible to develop real programs
using this API. In order to facilitate Haskell-based development, we
need a much wider, not-fixed set of libs which are guaranteed to be
available with every Haskell compiler. 

libraries should be split into 4 rings: frozen, core, base and the rest

* frozen libs are installed with haskell compiler and cannot be
upgraded using Cabal. it includes Cabal itself and libraries required
by Cabal, currently it's the Base library. compiler may provide its
own ways to upgrade these libs

* core libs are tied closely to specific compiler and version.
therefore, these are also preinstalled but can be upgraded with Cabal.
in order to make upgrading not-a-headache, version of such library must
include compiler version, i.e. TH 6.6.0. for ghc these currently
includes TH and STM libs

* base libs are *guaranteed* to be shipped with any haskell compiler
(compliant with this proposal). these libs are installed using Cabal
or OS package manager, only on poor Windows-like systems these should be
included in monolithic compiler distro. the reason is to allow user to
got latest, bug-fixed versions of these libraries for the installation
moment

these libs should include rich set of functionality. criteria of
inclusion library in this set are: widely used, small and portable.

Portability: these libs should work on windows and major unix
branches, on ghc/hugs/nhc and other proposal-compliant compilers,
otherwise we can't guarantee availability everywhere.
It should be easy for porters to prepare such lib for their systems

Widely used: this should include data structures, general data
processing, other things that facilitates development in general as
opposite to solve some particular problem. plus basic OS interfaces.

haskell98, readline, unix/Win32, QuickCheck, fgl, haskell-src, html,
mtl, network, parsec, time, xhtml,
ByteString, regex-*, Edison, Filepath, MissingH, NewBinary, arrows,
HUnit, QuickCheck, monads

it should be great also to strip down size of HaXml lib and include
it here. now it don't conform only to size criterion


* there are also other great libs that are either too fat or
os/compiler specific, such as gui and database ones. these can be
included in some distros or downloaded and installed separately using
Cabal infrastructure


there are also a number of Cabal-specific problems we should solve:

1) libraries required by setup scripts (Setup.hs) should be specified
as dependencies in .cabal file:

Build-Depends: FilePath

this way, the library will be installed just before running Setup
script. of course, all the Build-Depends libs should be made available
for setup script

2) cabal, cabal-get and other package management tools should use only
libraries from frozen set. any extra functionality required
(networking, file management...) should be *copied* into these
packages. this just means handmade instead of automatic dependencies
tracking, but we can't rely on automatic management for tools that
implement this management!


(this proposal don't include some topics, like testing and Hugs, where
i can't say anything new compared to Simon's page)

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com