Stepping back: what do we want from platform releases?

[Don Stewart]

bos:
> On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 12:34 PM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>  
> 
>     So
>     what is the additional purpose of platform releases?
> 
>          * Getting new features into the hands of users. Not everyone wants
>            to download the latest and greatest from hackage. They want to
>            use things tested together but still want new stuff
>            occasionally.
> 
> 
> This tangentially captures something that is important, but which I think
> deserves a much more prominent mention as an explicit goal: providing a
> "blessed" set of libraries that is large enough to be useful for many common
> programming tasks. In fact, I'd even suggest that the goal not just be to round
> out the collection of useful libraries, but that they be "good" according to
> criteria of efficiency, quality, and documentation, too. For instance, the
> Platform is currently missing a library for XML processing, but the obvious
> candidates on Hackage don't (in my eyes, at least) meet most of my criteria of
> "good".
> 
> It might be that identifying those gaps in "well roundedness" would be a
> helpful step towards encouraging the more focused development of suitable
> libraries, which I think would be a very good piece of fall-out from the
> Platform process.


Great point. I've captured it here:
http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages