[Haskell] ANN: Yi 0.6.3

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 29 March 2011 12:19, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
>> No, my meaning was that the reasoning of "I don't need to specify this
>> as a dependency since it's part of the Platform" isn't sound since not
>> everyone has the Platform.
>
> The point of the Platform is to provide a baseline.  So you *are* saying it
> is pointless, because you want packages to confirm to a different baseline.

My impression that the Platform was a baseline in regards to "what do
I need to get started to develop with Haskell?", and not in terms of
specifying dependencies.  After all, we still need to specify a
dependency on `base' in .cabal files, even though it comes with GHC
and other compilers (let alone the Platform)?

Consider also people who just want to use software written in Haskell
but aren't developers, especially those that use distros like Gentoo
that build from source (either by default or optionally for
non-packaged software) rather than using pre-built binaries: they
aren't going to want to know/care about the Platform, they just want
their package manager to get the minimal dependencies that are
required to build and install that piece of software.  As such, being
explicit about build tools is beneficial in this regard (e.g. when
gtk2hs was cabalised, how much fun was had when cabal-install couldn't
work out that it needed to install gtk2hs-buildtools to get the extra
build tools it needed?).

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com