[arch-haskell] Enabling profiling (-p) option for AUR packages

[Linus Arver]

Hello, I am listdata and I wanted to bring this discussion (re: enabling
profiling builds for AUR packages):

http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=30061

onto the mailing list.

Here are my 2 cents: @peti: From an end-user perspective (well, my
biased perspective), the expensive builds don't really matter that much
because Haskell (hackage) packages aren't updated often (at least the
ones I use...). And from a Haskell developer's perspective, a great
number of Haskell packages are _libraries_ (such as cmdargs,
haskell-pretty-show, haskell-haskell-lexer, haskell-regex-pcre) where
enabling profiling makes a lot of sense. I personally love profiling my
Haskell programs, and it bugs me that the AUR set of packages don't have
it enabled by default (based on cabal2arch's current defaults --- thanks
magus for pointing this out). Does anyone else find it annoying that you
can't profile your Haskell program because 1 or 2 AUR package doesn't
have profiling enabled?

I suspect that overwhelming majority of Haskell AUR consumers are
Haskell developers, and wouldn't care for the extra build times.

Then again, maybe there should be 2 classes of Haskell AUR packages ---
libraries vs. user programs, and only enable profiling for the
libraries. This setup would make much more sense, but at the cost of
manually identifying certain packages as libraries (from the thousands
currently out there.)

If there are any Arch Haskell developers reading this, please chime in.

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 05:26:28AM -0400, AUR Feedback wrote:
> from http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=30061
> peti wrote:
> 
> Hi Listdata, we haven't enabled profiling builds, because no-one ever
> asked for it. The Haskell packages that are distributed in [extra] are
> built with '-p' by default, but none of the AUR packages are. The
> reason for that is that [extra] packages are downloaded in binary
> form, so build times don't matter much for the average user. Packages
> from AUR, however, need to be compiled on the user's machine. These
> builds are fairly expensive already, because every library needs to be
> compiled twice to generate static and shared variants. If we'd add
> '-p' to those builds, too, then compile times would go up even
> further. That seems like a fairly high cost to impose on everyone in
> order to get a feature that most people don't need.
> 
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