[arch-haskell] Haskell's state in Arch & near future

[Vesa Kaihlavirta]

Hey,
I'm writing to inform you about some action I'm planning to
takeregarding our Haskell packages.

Current=======
The current status is this: we have in extra repo the
"HaskellPlatform" package which depends on 24 haskell libraries plus
ghc,cabal-install, alex and happy. Maintaining all these is
relativelycumbersome (although it could be made a bit nicer by some
cleverscripting) and in my opinion goes a bit against the simplicity
clauseof our beloved distro.
A bit worse is that our dependance on the haskell-platform means
thatwe cannot upgrade ghc as soon as we could. The current
platformdepends on ghc-7.0.3, and the platform's website informs
helpfully:"Next release: July 2011". People have been wishing for
ghc-7.2.1(released on 9 August 2011) for quite some time.

Future======
The actions I'm about to do are following:
    - remove haskell-platform and all its libs from extra     - only
keep ghc in extra    - alex, happy and cabal-install and the libs they
need       (5-10) go to community

Since a ghc upgrade usually calls for a rebuild of every library
thathas been built on it, this and any future ghc rebuild will have
aminimum of 2 week bug-free staging period to allow all
packagemaintainers at least some time to rebuild everything that's
needed.

Haskell binary repo===================
I've heard that there's a separate package repo for many
haskellpackages. That seems like a good idea, especially if it's easy
tolaunch a rebuild of everything, and if it works well enough. I'd
liketo hear about that, if anyone maintaining it happens to be
listening.

AUR===
My humble opinion is that we do not need to support any of thehaskell-
packages in AUR in any significant way, as cabal-install doesa far
better job there than our silly wrapper around it. If people wantto
maintain them, fine.



--vk