Haskell library infrastructure coordinator

[Peter Simons]

Simon Peyton-Jones writes:

 > Step 1 : identify coordinator
 > Step 2 : propose designs, discuss, evolve consensus
 > Step 3 : implement

 > My message only concerned step 1. Yours is about step 2. Which is
 > excellent, but it *isn't* do-or-die time for step 2.

Sorry, my wording was probably misleading. I didn't mean any
disrespect or opposition to Isaac Jones. The comment was purely meant
along the lines of: "Peter, you have been thinking about this for
weeks, so get it done already!"


Ketil Z. Malde writes:

 > It seems to me that binary packages should be mostly optional, and
 > can be deferred to the compiler developers to snarf from the
 > "hslibs" (stable) hierarchy and include at their leisure?

I agree.

Binary packages are can of worms. I remember when boost.org tried to
come up with a way to build and install them, and the effort more or
less failed, because designing an OS-independent mechanism is
incredibly hard. They ended up writing a complete build system of
their own (bjam) and today (2 years later) it still cannot do the
equivalent of "make install".

That's of course no reason it couldn't be done anyway, but it's
definitely not a trivial task. And it doesn't end with building and
installing: You want to have automated regression testing, generation
of documentation from varying input formats, and so on, and so forth.

So if we can get along without building the library ourselves at all,
it will make our life much easier -- and I'm sure most developers
won't care anyway. I, for one, do prefer source codes, like Ketil
does.

Peter