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

[Magnus Therning]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 09:36:54PM +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi Magnus,
> 
>  > I'm under the impression that there already are rather a lot of packages
>  > that are updated to deal with changes in 7.2. I don't have any numbers on
>  > that though, are there any such numbers ready available?
> 
> I am not aware of any statistics that estimate the percentage of
> packages broken with GHC 7.2.x, unfortunately, but even if we'd have
> those kind of statistics, the numbers might be deceptive. For
> instance, one of the packages that is broken is 'zlib'. zlib itself
> seems to compile fine, but the resulting package won't link when
> used by others. Now, that's just one package, but the effect of that
> particular problem is quite significant, because it cascades down
> the dependency chain. See
> 
>   http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/haskellPackages_ghc722.yesod
> 
> for a concrete example.

I can't figure out what I'm looking at on that page, it looks like
yesod fails to build.  I assume that's due to zlib, since that's what
you're talking about here.

I assume there's a bug report upstream about the issue that would
offer more useful information than a build log, or maybe a mail
discussion somehwere?

> Furthermore, the problem exists the other way round, too. There are
> packages that build fine with 7.2.x, but won't compile with older
> GHC versions, such as 'yap' or the latest version of 'repa'. Whether
> that is a problem or not depends on what you're trying to do,
> obviously.

For us that isn't a problem, the move to 7.2 would be one-way.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with
millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural
integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
     -- Alan Kay
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