[arch-haskell] cabal2arch 0.6.1 now generates bad dependencies

[Magnus Therning]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Tasha Buckley
<etherealgoddess at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:04 AM, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org> wrote:
>> I thought 6.10 came with Cabal as well, and that it was dealt with by
>> having 'ghc' provide 'haskell-cabal' in Arch.
> These points are all true, but yaourt (the tool most people use and
> what's recommended in the wiki) doesn't seem to respect this and it
> seems kind of odd to me to have haskell-cabal an an explicit dep when
> none of ghc's other known provided packages are made explicit. Finally
> and most importantly, the main issue is that these are literally the
> only dependencies being generated. For example, many new 6.12 packages
> require mtl, but that's not being placed in the depends array.

You are right, yaourt doesn't use the 'provides' field in the package
description, I'd argue that is a bug in yaourt though (see my comment
on the yaourt page in AUR from 8 March last year).  I wouldn't be
surprised if there are other sub-communities that bump into this as
well.  There is a new tool, paktahn, that aspires to take yaourt's
place, it's far from there, but it does handle 'provides' properly.

If you take a look at what GHC 6.12 has in its 'provides' I suspect
that a decision has been taken to put even more into it, not less.  I
personally think this is the correct route, even though it means
Haskell users are likely to bump into the yaourt bug even more often.

The point about missing dependencies in PKGBUILDs generated by
cabal2arch needs to be fixed.  You said it'd be easy, and I think you
are correct.  AFAIU the cabal2arch code what needs to be done is
remove all special handling of "core packages".  The few packages that
are shipped with GHC 6.12 are mentioned in its 'provides' field, so
*everything* should now be mentioned as a dependency.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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