[mercury-users] Mercury Anarchive proposal

[Peter Schachte]

Hi Ondrej,

> Given the harsh committing policy of the Mercury team I thought of
> introducing some anarchy ;-) and start Mercury Anarchive. The name can
> be shortened to Manarchive or Mana (pronounced either like mana or manna
> [mannah], depending on your religious background).

I think this is an excellent idea, for three reasons.  Firstly, the obvious:
more code available to be reused.  But secondly, I think it would be healthy
for Mercury if there were sources of Mercury code other than those available
from The University of Melbourne.  And thirdly, it will provide test cases of
maintaining Mercury development systems with multiple sources of libraries,
which will ensure any strangenesses arising from multiple libraries, if there
are any, are ironed out.

A few other points.  Firstly, to be maximally useful as a repository, I think
it would be best for you to set some policy about documentation.  Even if it's
just that library modules should be documented the same way Mercury's library
modules are.

Also, in addition to library modules, it would also be useful to have a
repository for applications (partially) written in Mercury.  These could range
from little "Hello World"-scale demos to full-blown applications.

Finally, your plan for testing the library suite sounds very good, but it's
also important that users should be able to grab individual libraries from the
archive and easily install them as part of their Mercury installation.  Note
that an "individual library" may comprise any number of source files.

-- 
Peter Schachte              Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        they are subtle and quick to anger.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338
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