Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

[Sterling Clover]

On Nov 7, 2010, at 4:13 PM, Neil Mitchell wrote:

> HLint is currently GPL licensed, but if that ever became an impediment
> to anyone doing anything with it I'd be willing to relicense it as
> BSD, including if that was the only thing blocking inclusion in the
> platform. HLint relies on cpphs and hscolour which are LGPL/GPL, which
> may be a problem.

Neil's comments indicate to me that he's willing to do some work to get HLint platform ready. While I don't use HLint, I think it would be an excellent addition to the beginner Haskell experience, and give its inclusion as a core developer tool an enthusiastic +1.

I would like to propose haskell-src-exts for inclusion into the platform along with HLint. It's an excellent package, well tested, and maintained, which provides a core service for anybody interested in DSLs, metaprogramming, or providing developer tools. At a (near) future point, we could then discuss removing haskell-src from the platform.

Uniplate and hscolour are also very good packages, but the former is one of many generics solutions, and the latter is rather special purpose. As such, I don't necessarily want to propose them for the platform at this time. But if there's not a straightforward way to coax cabal into installing the binary without the libraries, then there's always the sledgehammer solution of periodically pulling their repos into the HLint source tree.

Speaking of excellent developer tools produced by Neil, we should consider hoogle for platform inclusion as well. Along with uniplate, hoogle also depends on safe. I don't know how others feel, but I consider safe an essential library as well, which provides a standard way to avoid the partial functions of the prelude, and think that it would also warrant platform consideration.

Cheers,
Sterl.