cabal design

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| The thing that really annoys people is when some package they're using
| internally uses some random utility module eg "C2HS.hs" then they
cannot
| use that same module name in their program. This is the case even when
| the functions from that little utility module is not exposed in the
| interface of the package.

Yes -- but remember that what is exported from one package may become an
internal detail of another.

| detail but it exposed the cairo api directly to user programs. Now I
| believe that with the ELF linking format it is possible to set things
up
| such that if you link with Gtk+ (which links with libpng) you can
still
| use symbols in your top level program that are exported by libpng and
| you will not get linker errors.

Perhaps.  But it's leans more on linker cunning-ness, which is often not
very portable across platforms, in my limited experience.  And the
simple expedient of adding the package name to the "original name" does
the job once and for all.  So why not use the simple expedient, that
relies on no linker magic, and has stronger properties than what you
suggest?

Of course the programmer never sees this!  He just sets up a module name
space in which when he says "import A.B.C" it's clear which module A.B.C
he means.

Simon