Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 14:21 +0200, Axel Simon wrote:
> Hi Simon et al.,
> 
> On Aug 4, 2009, at 13:57, Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> 
> > Simon Marlow wrote:
> >
> >> By bringing gtk2hs into the platform, we would be giving the gtk2hs
> >> maintainers a helpful boost; they'd get more testing for one thing.
> >
> > I think that should explicitly not be a reason to bring things into  
> > the
> > platform.
> 
> 
> Bringing Gtk2Hs into the platform is certainly desirable. During the  
> last one or two years, the  amount of users has grown steadily which  
> is nice. However, Pete and my time is rather limited and is often  
> being used up by installation issues and questions that could be  
> answered with better documentation. Thus, it would be desirable to  
> bring Gtk2Hs into the platform because it would force us to simplify  
> installation and documentation.
> 
> For the former part, I wonder if cabalization is important for  
> Gtk2Hs. A cabalized version of Gtk2Hs would allow people to use Cairo  
> and Pango to create PDF documents without the need to install the GUI  
> parts of the library. On the contrary, if Gtk2Hs is shipped with the  
> platform, then all libraries are available anyway and cabalization  
> might not be as important.
> 
> My question: how important is cabalization for a package that wants  
> to be part of the platform?

Speaking with my distribution and HP release team hats on I think it is
essential. We cannot sensibly write automation tools for packages that
are not cabalised. I fully expect it to become a required criteria for
package inclusion.

Duncan