Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 6 November 2010 00:09, Max Bolingbroke <batterseapower at hotmail.com> wrote:
> On 5 November 2010 09:01, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
> <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Ummm... I should be able to download the GHC source tarball (or
>> generic unix binary) + the HP source tarball and be good to go from
>> there.
>
> I think you have misunderstood my proposal. The platform tarball could
> (and should!) include the source for the "private" libraries. I am
> only pointing out that such private libraries do not necessarily need
> to be installed into the system package list in the process of
> installing the Haskell Platform itself.

They would still need to be approved in such a way, and if the user
wants to update hlint then they would need to install those anyway.

Besides, unless you do a direct source unpacking + .cabal file
manipulation, I'm not sure if it's possible to have "private"
libraries.

>> Anyway, it's official policy:
>> http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirements
>
> I was not aware of this, thanks. However, the rationale states:
>
> """
> It may seem that it might be possible to allow shipping packages that
> are somehow "not blessed" as being part of the platform, however there
> is currently no obvious way to make a practical distinction between
> "blessed" and "not blessed".
> """
>
> Note that this is not true in the special case that "not blessed"
> packages are used only by an *executable* package. So it looks like
> the policy could be safely relaxed to admit this special case and
> hence allow HLint to be included. However, it would require a policy
> change and I do not know who is capable of making such changes, or if
> this change would be acceptable.

I think it isn't technically feasible at the moment, since a library
is either installed or it isn't; there's no real concept of a
"build-time only" library with Cabal.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com