Adding binary to the Haskell Platform

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 10:22 +0100, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> Don Stewart wrote:
> > Here's a ticket for Simon Marlow's proposal:
> > 
> >     http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/ticket/86
> > 
> > Let's discuss, then have the steering committee recommend yay/nay.
> 
> In http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2009-July/012139.html,
> Duncan said:
> 
> > It is not the intention that the committee members get much more say
> in
> > policy decisions than other active contributors to discussion on the
> > libraries mailing list. We hope therefore that the membership of the
> > committee does not need to be terribly formal. The only difficulty
> comes
> > when consensus cannot be reached on an issue where making some
> decision
> > is widely agreed to be better than making no decision. There is no
> > specified protocol for this situation at this stage.
> 
> So I'm a bit confused about what the purpose of the steering committee's
> recommendation would be. Would it amount to a decision about inclusion,
> or an expression of their opinion in the hope of guiding the community
> towards a consensus, or something else? The first choice contradicts
> what Duncan said was the role of the committee, while the second doesn't
> seem any more worthwhile than individual members expressing their own
> opinions separately.

Yes, there's clearly some confusion. It's not the job of the steering
committee to decide on individual packages going in. We want that to be
a community review process. The steering committee can use this or some
other package as a concrete example to help the community discuss what
the criteria for package inclusion ought to be. Having a specific
example may help to clarify the issue (or the details might distract).

Duncan