[Haskell-cafe] Correspondence between libraries and modules

[Gregg Lebovitz]

On 04/23/2012 12:03 AM, wren ng thornton wrote:
> However, until better technical support is implemented (not just for
> GHC, but also jhc, UHC,...) it's best to follow social practice.

Wren, I am new to Haskell and not aware of all of the conventions. Is 
there a place where I can find information on these social practices? 
Are they documented some place?

> However, centralization is prone to bottlenecks and systemic failure.
> As such, while it would be nice to ensure that a given module is
> provided by only one package, there is no mechanism in place to
> enforce this (except at compile time for the code that links the
> conflicting modules together).

 From someone new to the community, it seems that yes centralization has 
its issues, but it also seems that practices could be put in place that 
minimize the bottlenecks and systemic failures.

Unless I greatly misunderstand the challenges,  there seem to be lot of 
ways to approach this problem and none of them are new. We all use 
systems that are composed of many modules neatly combined into complete 
systems. Linux distributions do this well. So does Java. Maybe should 
borough from their experiences and think about how we put packages 
together and what mechanisms we need to resolve inter-package dependencies.

Am I missing something that makes this problem harder than other systems 
and languages? Is anyone currently working on the packaging  and 
distribution issues? If not, does anyone else want to work on it?