Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
- The packages seem to be of quite variable quality. Some are excellent,
some are rather poor (or just not maintained any more).
The problem is that only one person gets to comment on the quality of
a library, the author, who is about the least objective person.
Yes, perhaps so...
- Almost all packages seem to require a long list of dependencies.
Cabal-install will turn this from being a negative to being a
positive, if it ever delivers on its promise.
Here's to hoping. ;-)
- There seems to be an awful lot of packages that do the same thing but
with incompatible interfaces (and varying limitations). It seems we're
not very coordinated here.
Variety is good. Hopefully at some point people will start to
standardise. For example, there are at least 4 libraries for working
with HTML (TagSoup, HaXml, HXT, ...brain freeze...) - eventually
someone will write a nice summary tutorial on when to use which one.
In Haskell the interface is usually the most important bit, so making
different libraries use the same interface eliminates their
advantages.
Variety is good. Standardisation is also good (for different reasons).
Having half a dozen database access libraries (each of which only talks
to certain databases) is just confusing. I suppose the key is to find a
balance between having lots of choice and knowing which thing to choose.
(Also, when somebody writes a library, it's dependencies are going to be
the author's choice. Not much fun trying to use two libraries that both
depend on different, incompatible "binary" packages...)
Windows, the Operating System no one in the Haskell community loves...
Make sure you point all the bugs and even little annoyances that you
encounter, and hopefully things will head in the right direction.
Well, I've already filed 4 bugs against GHC. One was already fixed by
GHC 6.8.1 (yays!), one is trivial and will be fixed in 6.8.2, and the
other two it seems nobody is keen to work on. (In fairness, one of them
is fairly nontrivial.) I get the impression that I'd probably be
regarded as a pest if I just spent all day filing endless bug reports...
It would be quite nice if rather than just filing reports, I could do
something useful to help *fix* these bugs. But, unfortunately, that is
beyond my skill.
(On the other hand, even things that I should theoretically be able to
do I haven't managed to. You might remember a while back I offered to
try to spruce up the Haddoc documentation for Parsec. It has a great
user manual, but the Haddoc reference is Spartan. Well anyway, in the
end I couldn't figure out how to do that, so nothing got done...)
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