[Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch

[Ramana Kumar]

I believe your main question (how do I do my work without wasting time) has
already been answered: use IgnorePkg.

I would like to add, in case you missed it, that there is a mailing list
and community specifically for Haskell on Arch.
Here is the webpage: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchHaskell
The [haskell] repository is currently in sync with Hackage and builds with
the latest ghc. (It does not yet include all of Hackage; your help would be
welcome.)
(The [haskell-web] and [haskell-extra] repos include more packages, with
more or less in-sync-ness and omissions due to ghc 7.6 failures.)
Ultimately we do want Arch packages for Haskell packages, because cabal is
not a package manager (see
https://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-a-package-manager/
).

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 8:49 PM, <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> wrote:

> Hello,
> Who is in charge of the ghc and haskell packages on Arch linux?  The
> current system isn't working.
>
> Arch linux tends to update packages very quickly.
>
> For ghc, always having the latest ghc isn't a good thing.  At least if you
> actually want to get some work done.  A majority of the time the latest GHC
> is unusable. This is because the packages in hackage simply don't keep up.
> With the current ghc version(7.6.1) even some basic packages in hackage are
> not upgraded yet.
>
> Right now, a large number of other haskell related packages are in the
> arch repos. Other than gtk2hs, I think these packages are pointless
> duplications.  In the other cases, it has been my experience that it is
> simpler to maintain these packages through cabal rather than through
> pacman.  Support for these packages in Arch should probably be dropped.
>
> If you want to get work done in Arch with haskell, you should only install
> ghc and cabal-install(right now, you'll have to search the Internet for the
> old binaries, because the arch repos usually don't keep the old versions
> around).  Then you should add these packages to "IgnorePkg =" in
> pacman.conf  this way things won't break every couple of months.  You can
> then choose to upgrade when you wish.
>
> I hope that someone who is involved with the haskell Arch stuff reads
> this.  The current model needs to be rethought.  Linux should be sane by
> default, but I've lost many many hours learning that arch's relationship
> with haskell is not so :(  Probably the best solution would be to make Arch
> automatically keep two versions of ghc around at any given time.
>
> Thank you for your time,
> Timothy Hobbs
>
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>
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