Haskell Platform Proposal: HLint

[Don Stewart]

s.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.

I think this would make a great contribution in the January round of
proposals.
  
> 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.

Hscolour is an optional dep of Haddock (but it also has a problematic
license at the moment). We should think about what to do here.

-- Don