Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Simon Marlow]

On 04/08/2009 12:07, Gwern Branwen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 7:02 AM, Simon Marlow<marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Add
>>
>>  * binary
>>  * getopt
>>  * gtk2hs
>
> A definite yes to binary and getopt; but gtk2hs? I don't trust its
> longevity or maintenance, and as other people have pointed out, it will
> make the platform harder to support. As well, we risk holding back the
> platform - hasn't gtk2hs lagged GHC releases in the past? (I seem to
> remember some of the lags being quite lengthy.)

Adding gtk2hs would be a bold step, no doubt about it.  By proposing it 
I'm hoping to force the issues to the surface: is gtk2hs the GUI lib we 
want to recommend, or standardise on?  If it is, and it has maintenance 
issues, then those need to be addressed.  As far as I'm aware, gtk2hs is 
the only plausible option for serious GUI development in Haskell at the 
moment.

By bringing gtk2hs into the platform, we would be giving the gtk2hs 
maintainers a helpful boost; they'd get more testing for one thing.

>> Also
>>
>>  * keep an eye on text.  We certainly want it, but it's
>>   a young package and there's no text I/O yet.
>>  * decide which regex package(s) we want
>>  * remove html? (we have xhtml)
>>  * replace haskell-src with haskell-src-exts
>>  * remove packedstring
>
> Absolutely. I thought we had already done this - didn't TH's unnecessary
> use of packedstring get removed a while ago?

Not in the version of TH shipping with GHC 6.10.x, but it will be gone 
in GHC 6.12.

Cheers,
	Simon