HTTP and character encodings

[Vincent Hanquez]

On 09/11/2012 07:27 PM, Ben Millwood wrote:
> As an aside, the major reason I support HTTP over something like
> http-conduit is the latter's titanic dependency list. I think
> especially as a dependency of cabal-install that's something of a
> dealbreaker:
>
> $ cabal install http-conduit | grep 'new package' | wc -l
> [...]
> 47
I'm not sure what do you want to demonstrate here, number of packages couldn't 
be a more irrelevant metric. Would you prefer a package that includes everything 
in one giant codebase ?

For example, the whole haskell TLS stack is responsible for at least 10~15 
packages in http-conduit's list. I could easily put everything in one giant 
package, openssl style. However i think it make more sense to build bricks 
(asn1, crypto hashes, ..) that can be reused in different libraries/programs 
(and indeed they are).

Now cabal-install is a bit of a special case, and keeping HTTP working is 
probably a good idea. But at the Platform level, while i agree the amount of 
work required is huge and not without controversies, keeping HTTP instead of 
http-conduit just make it likely the platform will be (is) irrelevant for many 
people.

-- 
Vincent