Try getting rid of the dependency on the interpolate package

[sjakobi]

This is a package dependency graph for hnix, produced with stack dot --external | dot -Tpng hnix.png and this stack.yaml:

resolver: lts-16.1
extra-deps:
- hashing-0.1.0.1@sha256:98861f16791946cdf28e3c7a6ee9ac8b72d546d6e33c569c7087ef18253294e7,2816
- hnix-store-core-0.2.0.0@sha256:1c52ed924ca51130e3850d7f793975b98995da0fba57b15a81e73918921e0caf,2651
- monadlist-0.0.2@sha256:978305e3f03dd5f65c673b551124dac0c39a247c2c14d84739ca9a3405fbb63a,904
- ref-tf-0.4.0.2@sha256:69de3550250e0cd69f45d080359cb314a9487c915024349c75b78732bbee9332,1134

If you look at the right border of the image, you see a dependency chain interpolate -> haskell-src-meta -> haskell-src-exts.

haskell-src-exts is notorious for being undermaintained and taking ages to compile. If we could get rid of interpolate, we could also shed this dependency.

To replace interpolate we could try using neat-interpolation, which would AFAICT incur no additional dependencies. I'm not too familiar with either package, but I know that dhall uses neat-interpolation too.

[Anton-Latukha]

That is some SWAT work dude.

[Anton-Latukha]

I not used stack in years. AFAIR this seems to be Graphviz kind of graphs.

Graphviz files can be imported into Gephi, well, may things can be imported into Gephi, and I used to use different untangling, clustering, Atlas2 on graphs like this.

I used to love to visualize the whole stores. I think today cool features like this, there should be web service to look at Haskell ecosystem or Nixpkgs closures, or even provided on Hackage for dependency monitoring. WebGL can easily draw huge complex graphs.

[sjakobi]

I haven't come up with this idea by looking at the graph BTW. I was rebuilding hnix and noticed that we're building haskell-src-exts, which just seemed like a bad idea so I investigated a bit.

stack dot does indeed produce output for Graphviz. It uses ghc-pkg dot under the hood, so there are probably other tools that can produce these package graphs too – I was just familiar with this one.

Gephi looks cool, but I'm too lazy to try to install it right now. I'm on Ubuntu :(

[Anton-Latukha]

Most days of my life I wish my desktop was on Ubuntu.

NixOS is very rough this year.

Gephi is a major software, it should be available for Ubuntu.

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I used to like Gephi to watch closures, dependency graphs in code and Linux package project dependencies, Docker images dependencies, build a graph of surrounding nodes for something.