Contrib packages

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

"Simon Peyton-Jones" <IMCEAEX-_O=MICROSOFT_OU=NORTHAMERICA_CN=RECIPIENTS_CN=428592@microsoft.com> wrote,

> These both raise a common question: how can someone distribute a
> library?   (This is a different question to the library-infrastructure
> question about how to build a library, which we've been discussing
> recently.)
[..]
> OK so that's the idea.
> 
> 1.  Does it seem like a reasonable idea?
> 
> 2.  There is a pressing need for the first Contrib Builder for libraries
> 	like Dominic's crypto and Koen's Chunk library.  Any volunteers?
> 	Even for one implementation target?

Languages like Perl and Python face the similar problems as
we do, although they have less language implementations to
worry about (at least for Python, there is more than one
implementation).  So, the question is whether we can't more
or less follow their lead.  Perl is certainly extremely
successful at establishing itself by way of a flourishing
libraries community.

I don't know many details of how the Perl community works,
but here are what seem to be core points:

* Well-known central repository: CPAN <http://www.cpan.org/>

* Binary distributions of library packages can be obtained
  independent of the main system.  CPAN has something called
  Perl Ports.  On my RedHat 8.0 system, grepping for Perl
  packages leads to the appended result.

To facilitate this, it would probably be worthwhile to have
some infrastructure that makes it easy for a library author
to make a new library portable across operating systems and
Haskell implementations (and their associated build and
package systems).  If this were really simple, we might not
need to agglomerate unrelated libraries into random contrib
packages.  I don't really have much of a concrete idea of
how such an infrastructure should look like, but maybe
somebody else has.

Cheers,
Manuel

-=-

AttitudeAdjuster chak 608 (~): rpm -qa |grep perl
perl-Storable-1.0.14-15
perl-DateManip-5.40-27
perl-XML-Dumper-0.4-22
perl-Inline-0.43-7
perl-5.8.0-55
perl-SGMLSpm-1.03ii-6
perl-libwww-perl-5.65-2
groff-perl-1.18-6
perl-suidperl-5.8.0-55
openssl-perl-0.9.6b-33
perl-Filter-1.28-9
perl-HTML-Parser-3.26-14
perl-XML-Parser-2.31-12
perl-libxml-enno-1.02-25
gimp-perl-1.2.3-9
perl-Parse-Yapp-1.05-26
perl-libxml-perl-0.07-25
perl-XML-Grove-0.46alpha-21
perl-PDL-2.3.2-10
perl-URI-1.21-3
perl-XML-Twig-3.05-3
perl-CGI-2.81-55
perl-CPAN-1.61-55
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.03-25
perl-XML-Encoding-1.01-20
perl-DB_File-1.804-55