More platform packages

[Gregory Collins]

Hi all,

Hopefully you've noticed the proposal I made this morning for attoparsec to
join the list of platform packages. I wanted to bring up a matter for
discussion before I propose more packages for inclusion. I'd very much like
for the following packages written by Bryan to make it into the platform:

   - aeson
   - criterion
   - mwc-random
   - statistics

The question is: what do we do, in general, if we want a package but its
inclusion would force us to pull in other non-platform packages?
Specifically re: the above list, statistics depends on erf and
math-functions, aeson depends on hashable and unordered-containers, and
criterion depends on aeson, hastache, and vector-algorithms.

I remember that we ran into the same issue vis-a-vis vector pulling in the
"primitive" package, but I'm not sure that the discussion was resolved in a
way that sets a usable precedent. Here my gut feeling would be that
"hastache" doesn't cut it as a platform package, we probably want to fold
unordered-containers into containers in the long term, erf and
math-functions are probably OK to include as they are.

What should we do in these cases? Asking package maintainers to shoulder
the burden of gutting or completely refactoring their packages to get rid
of dependencies we don't like seems contrary to the spirit of what we are
trying to accomplish here. Our procedures seem to be mostly geared around
refining an individual package's API and then having up-and-down votes on
inclusion/exclusion. I worry that this is going to disqualify libraries
that we really, *really* want to include because their maintainers won't
want to do the pointless busywork that might be required alone.

Should we instead establish a loose "strike force" (I hesitate to use the
word "committee") that would work to further these kinds of long-term goals
by helping maintainers refactor things to make them more platform-friendly?

G
-- 
Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>
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