Library Infrastructure Proposal & Home Page

[Isaac Jones]

Wolfgang Thaller <wolfgang.thaller at gmx.net> writes:

> Great Work!
>
> A few questions:
>
> How will the Library Infrastructure itself be distributed?
> Will it be distributed separately? Or can it be included with Haskell
> implementations?

That is a good question because if there weren't an answer, it would
imply a bootstrapping problem.  Its actually answered under the "Use
Cases" (section 5) for the Haskell Implementation [1] authors:

   "Include the Distribution module with the Haskell Implementations
   (in exchange, we can hopefully remove some libraries that are
   currently included with the Haskell Implementations)."

I'm hoping that the Implementations (and their configuration settings)
can be used as bootstrap configuration for the Distribution module
(like where configuration files should go, in /etc or
/Library/Preferences or whatever).

So this brings up the question: won't certain things like
haskell-config (section 4.4) need to be distributed with the
implementations as well?  Yes!  And what if one implementation is
installed already and you go to install another one?  It'll probably
have to try to find haskell-config, and if it can't, assume that its
the only / first implementation being installed.  If it finds
haskell-config, then it'll probably want to ask haskell-config where
to look for packages.conf.

These issues are indeed a little thorny, but I think that if the
implementations can configure haskell-config as a bootstrapping step
in the configuration process, then they can use pretty generic code
for querying haskell-config for the rest of the configuration
questions related to packaging.

peace,

isaac


[1] implementation == compiler or interpreter