Haskell Libraries Wishlist

[Simon Marlow]

On 13 October 2004 02:18, Shae Matijs Erisson wrote:

> Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> writes:
> 
>> How can this be solved?  Somebody could sit down and build a system
>> that supports author submission that get automatically processed
>> etc.  AFAIK that has been proposed before and nothing happened.  So,
>> I wonder why not reuse a resource that already exists, namely
> 
> This exists: http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/LibrariesAndTools
> 
>> Freshmeat entries need not necessarily be created and updated by the
>> authors of some software.  Instead, interested users can maintain a
>> freshmeat entry. This facility seems to improve the accuracy of the
>> freshmeat db. 
> 
> freshmeat seems like a good idea too.

I'd just like to say something about the direction I think we want to be
headed here.  As our package infrastructure and Cabal
(http://www.haskell.org/libraryInfrastructure/) become more mature, we
should aim to base our library story around Packages.  This way we get a
consistent view of libraries, with a consistent set of tools to build,
install and manage them.

So what's still needed for this to happen?  Well, I'm planning to
support more of the Package proposal in GHC 6.4 (package versioning,
exposed/unexposed packages & modules, per-user package configuration
etc.). We also need more people to package their libraries using Cabal,
try to find areas of weakness and help fix them.

Finally, we need one place to list Packages.  The LibrarisAndTools page
in the Wiki is a good start, but it needs to transition to be more
Package-centric.  Just starting a new section for Cabal packages would
be a good idea for now.

We need to provide easily accessible answers to questions that
prospective library contributors have:

  - what package name can I use?  (short answer: choose one that isn't
    used yet).

  - what module names can I use?

  - what guidelines are there for designing library interfaces?

We have various half-baked or out of date answers to these questions,
but it's probably about time we revised the story and made it more
prominent.  Hmm, I think I just talked myself into tackling this.

Cheers,
	Simon