[arch-haskell] arch-haskell repo and ABS tree

[Magnus Therning]

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 21:33, Xyne <xyne at archlinux.ca> wrote:
> On 2010-10-07 11:54 -0700 (40:4)
> Don Stewart wrote:
>> xyne:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I want to suggest that the Arch Haskell group create their own repo and ABS
>> > tree, and withdraw from the AUR.
>> >
>> > Requests to orphan neglected haskell packages come up relatively often on the
>> > aur-general mailing list and the lack of active support is a cause of
>> > frustration, even if it is understandable.
>> >
>> > Creating a separate binary repo and an ABS tree would provide consistency and
>> > could be made official (maybe hosted on archlinux.org and mirrored, or
>> > hackage). Users who wish to maintain haskell packages in the AUR could then do
>> > so without interfering with global consistency. Those who need newer packages
>> > could enable the AUR via e.g. bauerbill and those who simply wish to have
>> > access to the full set provided by Arch Haskell would enable the repo or build
>> > from its ABS tree. Maybe I could even provide support in bauerbill.
>> >
>>
>> How do we manage the binary ABI incompatibilities? This was a problem
>> last time we tried to maintain a large binary repo: each upgrade
>> requires a topological rebuild of the downstream dependencies.
>
> Couldn't you handle that with build scripts that track dependency hierarchies
> and rebuild as necessary? For example, when a package is upgraded all packages
> that depend on it (directly or indirectly) could be automatically rebuilt.

I think that would be possible, yes.

> The idea would be to move all Haskell packages (i.e. including ghc and all
> others in the official repos) to this repo and manage them there. You would
> then have full control over the package hierarchy.
>
> Considering the recent creation of [multilib], [haskell] or [arch-haskell]
> should be a strong candidate for official status.

It would be very nice to get that sort of recognition.  I'd love being
able to say that I run the most Haskell-friendly distro in the world
;-)

One thing though, if ghc was taken out of [extra] then wouldn't this
mean that no tool written in Haskell could ever make it into [extra]?
(E.g. darcs)

> The following is mostly thinking out loud, but this might also be a way to
> manage multiple versions of different packages. You could place all of the
> different versions in the same repo directory and then simply provide different
> databases container various subsets of those packages. I have an idea for a
> tool that could easily enable and disable databases on the user end so the user
> would not have to update pacman.conf manually. Meh, it's just a tangential
> idea... although I'm going to test something now.

Any ideas on how to bootstrap this, and also how to build a team for it?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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