Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 12:02 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> On 04/08/2009 00:59, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 04:44:32PM -0700, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> >>
> >> How would you identify the top, say, 5 libs to add?
> >
> > I would not look for libs to add. I would wait for people to come and
> > tell me that they think that particular libs are worthy of addition, and
> > then decide whether or not I agree.
> 
> Ok, to kick things off then, I propose the following:
> 
> Add
> 
>   * binary
>   * getopt
>   * gtk2hs

Now that's just crazy-talk! :-)

What/where is getopt? It's not on hackage. Elsewhere we've raised our
concerns about binary. gtk2hs is of course not cabalised.

> Also
> 
>   * keep an eye on text.  We certainly want it, but it's
>     a young package and there's no text I/O yet.

I'd say go for it. If the current API is good then that's enough. It's
not clear that there needs to be separate I/O modules for it. I might
suggest hiding all the fusion modules for starter though.

>   * decide which regex package(s) we want

I'd like input from the regex maintainer here. In particular which
backend do we want in the platform and can we please avoid having more
than one (if we can't choose how do we expect users to choose).

>   * remove html? (we have xhtml)

On the other hand xhtml seems to be going out of fashion.

>   * replace haskell-src with haskell-src-exts

Yes, if the maintainer thinks its ready.

>   * remove packedstring

Yes! And editline.

Duncan