[Haskell-cafe] Poll: Do you need to be able to build darcs from source on GHC 6.6?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 12:16 +1100, Trent W. Buck wrote:
> David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> writes:
> 
> > And as far as bundled versions, it's the desire to *remove* a bundled
> > version that's apparently at issue.  I'm not sure why this is
> > considered desirable, but apparently some folks feel strongly about
> > this.
> 
> Could someone please summarize what code is currently bundled with darcs
> that isn't darcs?  I had the impression that most of it was "in house"
> code that had/has not been formalized into a separate libraries yet
> (e.g. an FFI for zlib, byte strings before they were librarified).

Right, there are no external packages that are bundled with darcs.

> To me, that's different from a bundled (convenience) copy, which is
> where you basically download libfoo's tarball, unpack it in your source
> tree, and then do "darcs rec -lam 'Install copy of libfoo 5.1'".

Indeed, and the question is which is better. Pretty much everyone agrees
that bundling is bad, but there is also the argument that maintaining
code "in house" that does the same thing is even worse. At least with
the bundling approach the maintenance is lower and the quality is
potentially higher. It also has the significant advantage that a single
common modern API can be used throughout the project code.

Duncan