HTTP and character encodings

[Ben Millwood]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Vincent Hanquez <tab at snarc.org> wrote:
> 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 ?

Sorry, I realise in retrospect that my original message was
misleading, I should have been more clear: http-conduit is a great
package and I would recommend it for /most/ HTTP applications. But
there is virtue to having an /alternative/ that is much less capable
but much less heavyweight in terms of the things it needs. Especially
since some people will want to install cabal-install without already
/having/ cabal-install, using the bootstrap script, which needs to
manually download and install the entire transitive dependency list.
Imagine if that was 47 packages!

The way that http-conduit is designed and built is definitely correct.
It should be in many small packages so that it can be reused. But HTTP
with a lightweight dependency list also has its place.