Hello Here are some problems I see with the scheme:
1) No easy way of seing the dependencies of a single package. Currently I can just look at the Cabal file and know what packages are required. In the new scheme I would need to grep all the source files. Not a very good improvement in my opinion. 2) What about machines without an easy http connection out? These machines are not as uncommon as you may think. Some companies have internal networks not connected to the rest of the net (and internet connected machines separate) - and even home I would like to use Haskell even if there is a network outage. 3) Package versions You cannot have to modules with the same name in your application. This is a limit in GHC afaik, not the current import syntax. To handle versioning you should plan ahead and make new versions support the serialization syntax of older versions. So there would be no real advantage. Also if we use an url like http://package/newest then we don't have control when we start using a new version of library (while usually one wants to test that) and if we use http://package/version then we have to perform the update in all the source files which use the package (and if we support multiple versions then missing one will have "fun" results). 4) Does not help for nontrivial packages Most nontrivial packages are a lot more than simple haskell source files scattered somewhere. They may have C-sources, need configuration when build or use alex, happy, cpphs or somesuch. - Einar Karttunen _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
