[arch-haskell] help upgrading packages

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Nicola Squartini <tensor5 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 2:24 PM, Dawid Loubser <dawid.loubser at ibi.co.za>
> wrote:
>>
>> I had a similar issue with a large number of packages.
>> I ended up removing and re-installing my entire Haskell ecosystem, and now
>> things work again.
>>
> Normally this should never happen. It's because Haskell is very strict on
> dependencies (despite being lazy on other things).
> In this case the reason was that those packages were added to the repository
> [haskell-core] with initial release number set to 1, although they had been
> in [haskell-happstack] already for some time and their release number was
> higher. I removed those immediately from [haskell-happstack] to avoid
> duplicate work, but they must also be manually removed from local, since
> pacman always keeps the highest version-release.
>
> In order to avoid this kind of issues in the future we should either have a
> policy to coordinate work between different haskell repositories, or merge
> everything into a unique repository and call it simply [haskell].

Indeed.  This is entirely my fault!

I have not been keeping track of what is available in any other repos
at all.  I was even under the impression that there were no other
maintained repos at the moment.  Clearly I am completely wrong :(

>> I note the absence of certain packages like haskell-buildwrapper (which
>> EclipseFP tools needs) - and reading the wiki, it seems confusing at this
>> time whether the Haskell tinkerer / developer should just be using
>> cabal-install to install all required packages (even though I know that
>> cabal is not a package management system) or... what?
>
> Personally I don't like installing things using cabal-install because in my
> opinion the distro package manager should always be in charge.

The same goes for me.  Occasionally I revert to installing a package
for the local user only, but not even then do I use `cabal install` to
do that, I prefer running `./Setup.hs configure,build,install` myself.

I do mean to look into using `cabal` myself at some point, because I
keep on hearing good things about it.  So far every time I've tried it
I've run into something weird, most recently it was trying to install
an older version of a lib than was needed, and I already had the newer
version installed on my system too.  A lot of terrifyingly clever
people swear by it though, so there has to be something I'm missing
out on!

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus