Summary of progress

[Simon Marlow]

> On Sun, Mar 11, 2001 at 01:28:38PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> >=20
> > Proposal 2b: adopt a "Std." namespace for libraries that
> >              are common to all implementations.
> >=20
> >   * There is little agreement here.  Simon M, Manuel, and
> >     others have expressed their doubts that it is workable.
> >     No-one has defended the idea except me.  But then Simon
> >     posted a hierarchy layout proposal in which "Haskell."
> >     seemed to take the role of "Std.".  So I'm a bit
> >     confused.  I'd like to see some more discussion about
> >     this.
>=20
> I think that a common prefix for the standard libraries will get to be
> a pain far more than one for non standard ones, and non standard ones
> are going to have a huge prefix for uniqueness anyway. The chances are
> most modules will either be in . or be standard anyway. My vote is for
> a user.* hierarchy with mangled e-mail addresses as I have previously
> described.

That'd be fine with me.

Actually, to address Malcolm's (understandable) confusion, the
differences between "Haskell" and "Std" are mainly that entry into
"Haskell" is much easier.  For a new library, it could be brought in
immediately but marked "non-standard" until such time as the community
has discussed and agreed on an interface.  In the meantime, compilers
would be free to distribute the non-standard version for testing.

I've no objection to dropping the "Haskell" prefix and adding a prefix
for the non-"Haskell" parts of the tree.

An alternative might be to adopt an extension such that

	import Haskell.

would add D/Haskell/ to the search path for each D in the current search
path, and perhaps the "import Haskell." could be implicit, like "import
Prelude".

> > Proposal 3: develop a social process for adding new libraries
> >             to the "standard" set.
> >=20
> >   * Well, this list is the starting point, so there's not
> >     much more to be said on that.
> >   * The set of criteria by which we as a community might
> >     judge whether a library is recognised as "standard"
> >     have not really received any comment.
>=20
> In the absence of some sort of committee or community voting, it
> essentially comes down to what the hugs, GHC and NHC maintainers agree
> on in practise. As things stand I suspect it will be decided between
> then with the more controversial ones argued out on a mailing list.

Voting is something we want to avoid, I think.  Too often you end up
with a result you don't like :-).  Open discussion, followed by an
informed decision by a few trusted individuals would get my vote.

Cheers,
	Simon