exposed packages and cabal depends

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

Simon,

The -hide-all-packages option would make sense only if there were real 
flexibility in selecting which packages to use in implementing the 
modules imported into your program.  However, in our discussions, you 
you've defined two rules that eliminate this flexibility:

* you cannot use two different modules with the same module ID in the
   same program

* you cannot use two different packages with the same module ID in the
   same program

Together these constraints imply that packages should contain only 
minimal sets of mutually interdependent modules; every additional 
module included in a package restricts its usability.  So, if no two 
packages should contain the same module name, one must therefore 
conclude:

  Package Dependency Rule: The module names used in a program
  completely specify the packages required to interpret/compile it.

Abstractly, we can imagine a two column table with one column 
containing unique module names and the other column containing package 
locations (perhaps available from hackage).

With such a table, you eliminate untracked dependencies by hiding all 
modules from a package any time the programmer uses any module name 
from that package (you should also explicitly tell the user which 
packages are being hidden and why).

If you are doing separate compilation, you should then be accumulating 
lists of package that must be hidden at link time.  Is there a major 
problem with doing this?

To be clear, my problem with -hide-all-packages is that it creates 
much greater risk of getting out of sync with the global table. 
Build-depends tags are actively bad because you cannot know the nth 
degree dependencies of the packages you are using.  Correctness is 
only with respect to the global table.

Yes, I am begging the question of how we construct and manage global 
tables in a way that preserves free-packaging/decentralization. 
(Perhaps it is with user specifiable hackage tables)  But, there is no 
point in talking about solutions until we agree on the problems that 
need to be solved.

-Alex-

______________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com

On Fri, 8 Apr 2005, Simon Marlow wrote:

> Hi Alex,
>
> On 08 April 2005 16:09, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
>
>> This choice adds complexity without adding value.
>
> It adds a lot of value: it will prevent untracked dependencies from
> creeping into Cabal packages.  That's gotta be a good thing, right?
>
> With -hide-all-packages, there are no exposed packages by defualt, which
> is what you were arguing for!
>
>> The simplest approach would be for -i to take precedence over
>> default packages.
>
> That only partly solves the problem - you can still write source code
> that depends on environmental settings by importing modules from exposed
> packages.
>
> Even so, it seems a reasonable suggestion.  We thought about it, but
> discovered that it leads to more problems: you can allow a local module
> M to override a module M in a package P only as long as nothing from P
> is required by any module in the current program.  To know that, you
> have to examine all the modules in the current program, which is
> difficult when doing separate compilation.  You could end up with some
> modules compiled in a context that thinks M is a local module, and
> others compiled thinking M comes from package P.  Bad things probably
> happen, and it's not clear that we can always tell that this has
> happened before delivering the executable.  At the least, the error
> turns up at unpredictable points (eg. when you turn optimisation on).
>
>> The -hide-all-packages approach creates much higher risk of testing
>> in a package context out of sync with the world at large.
>
> Hmm, I don't think you've understood what -hide-all-packages does.  It
> gives you a *consistent* view of packages across all installations: it
> eliminates differences between what packages are exposed by default at
> different sites.  That is a Good Thing.
>
> You'd probably be more comfortable if -hide-all-packages was the
> default.  Well, I'm not going to argue with that, except to say that it
> probably will be the default when using Cabal.
>
>> What we really need is a community consensus system (wiki or dns)
>> for mapping module names to package locations and for
>> implementations to interpret modules in this context.
>
> Hackage will effectively provide a function from
>
>  Module -> [Package]
>
> that's what you want, right?  But we don't want a single centralised
> registry for module names, so it will also be possible to get packages
> from source other than Hackage.
>
>> Package names that are not URLs add complexity without value.
>
> Just think of all our existing packages as having an implicit prefix of
> http://haskell.org/packages/ (or something).  Does that help?  We'll get
> full URLs as package names in the future (at least, that's what I'd like
> to see).
>
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
>