[Hs-Generics] Developing SYB, packaging issues

[José Pedro Magalhães]

Hello,

Thanks for your answer. Replying below:

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 11:16, Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>wrote:

>   I understand that with the proposed base package breakup [1], SYB will
> be moved to a separate package. But I still don't know how this will reflect
> on the development of the library. In particular:
>
> 1) Where is the source code going to be hosted? Here in Utrecht we
> currently have a repository with several (cabalized) generic programming
> libraries, SYB included. But maybe SYB will stay in the same repository as
> GHC?
>
> I don't think it matters too much where it's hosted.  For us it might be
> convenient if it was on darcs.haskell.org because it reduces the number of
> ways in which you can get stuck.  But servers are fairly reliable so this
> probably isn't very important.
>

We might prefer to keep it in an SVN repository where we have other generic
libraries, if that is not a big problem. If it is, it can always go to
darcs.haskell.org anyway.


>
> 2) Can development proceed independently of GHC, i.e. can a new version of
> SYB be released without a new version of GHC?
>
> Yes, I think that independent development is part of the goal.   The
> easiest way to achieve this is for SYB **not** to be a GHC "core package".
> That is, not needed to build GHC (or GHCi, or the GHC library).   Then it's
> "just a library" like GtK or LibCurl, and you can upgrade it whenever you
> like.
>
> It's more complicated if it's a core package. For example, if the GHC API
> uses SYB to implement something, then package "ghc-6.9" will depend on
> package "SYB-2.7", and while you can also have SYB-3.2 installed the ghc-6.9
> package will still use the "SYB-2.7".
>

I think indeed having it outside of the core is the best thing.


>
> 3) How does the separation affect the automatic instance deriving
> mechanism?
>
>  It think it'd make sense for the classes Data and Typable themselves to
> remain in a "core package", precisely because the deriving mechanism
> generates code for them.  If you change the method signatures, the code has
> to change, for example.  But all the library code layered on top can be in
> the SYB package.
>

Ok, that makes sense. Only any changes to methods in Data would need to wait
for a new version of GHC. But those should be kept to a minimum, if any at
all. It's just a pity that so many methods are inside the Data class (like
gmapQ and friends). But then again, there is a reason for them to be there,
and it's probably not a good idea to change those anyway. Most development
should proceed by adding new things on top of the existing Data class core.

What about instances of Data for the base types? Here I see a few
possibilities:
1) No types have instances in core. Those could be in the SYB package, or
the user could use stand-alone deriving to get them (if that is possible).
2) All types have instances in core, similar to the current
Data.Generics.Instances situation. This implies that the situation discussed
in [1] (inconvenient Data instances) will remain.
3) Something between the previous two, such as the 'standard' Data instances
staying in core, and the others going to the SYB package (where they could
be thought over, or separated into another module which is not imported by
default).


Pedro

[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/generics/2008-June/000347.html
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