PackageStaging

Package Staging

In Mark's HIW 2012 talk Haskell Platform: Field Report and Future Goals (Slides, Video), he called for an expansion of the content of the platform to bring it up to par with what other programming language platforms provide.

This page is to start the process of making that happen. In the talk, there was a list of the kinds of things that are missing from the platfrom. This list has been reproduced here, with some changes

 * '''Crypto''' — hashing, mac, ssl, uuid, common cyphers (aes, des, etc...)
 * '''Data Formatting''' — csv, json, base64, yaml, mme, xml, parsing, generation
 * '''Database''' — dbm, *sql, sqllite
 * '''Encoding''' — base64, quotedprintable
 * '''Image Processing''' — rendering, compositing
 * '''Math''' — statistics
 * '''Media''' — audio formats, image formats, video formats, id3, media containers
 * '''Network Services''' — amqp, curl, memcached, sessions
 * '''OS Services''' — logging, file utils
 * '''Programming''' — benchmarking, test framework
 * '''Text''' — html, diff
 * '''UI''' — curses, gui framework(s)

Next Release: 2013.2.0.0

Looking to the next release, 2013.2.0.0, here is a stab at the top priorities of things to add, and some initial suggestions for packages:

 * benchmarking — criterion
 * test framework — test-framework, test-framework-quickcheck2, test-framework-hunit

 * html — our current offering, xhtml is somewhat out of date. We need comprehensive support for HTML5, both generation and parsing
 * xml — there's a lot to choose from
 * tar — ???

 * dbm/BerkeleyDB
 * sqllite
 * sql generation
 * *sql connectors

 * crypto hash/mac/ciphers — hashable & Crypto, other packages?
 * uuid — uuid?

 * fileutils
 * logging

 * 2D graphics generation — gloss and/or diagrams

That's quite a lot of packages, but for now, let's keep an open mind. If we want even half that many (and we do!) then we need to start contemplating all this now.