[arch-haskell] Near past, present & future

[Don Stewart]

Ok. So what do we do next?

AUR is now up to date. cabal2arch is working with 6.10/new cabal.

Quick thoughts:

    * xmonad 0.8.1 this week
    * move 6.10 from testing
        -- i'm really happy with how many packages are working now,
            and i've updated most of AUR to work with 6.10
    * cabal-install in binary form

Then the platform, which means some non-Arch work, and design of the
meta-package. We can make Arch the testing system for the platform


vpkaihla:
> Hi guys,
> 
> As some of you may have noticed (perhaps with some pain), ghc-6.10.1
> has been in testing
> for over a week now. Some performance regressions have been noticed,
> and some packages
> fail to build on it (most due to trivial problems). That's why it
> won't be coming to extra too
> soon. Nevertheless, I'm using it as my main platform for development,
> and it works well.
> 
> Presently, the next big thing will be the Haskell Platform, which is
> basically a bundle
> of important packages. We will try to get the packages in it to extra,
> with a "haskell-platform"
> group defined. So pacman -S haskell-platform should get you all the
> goodies now and forever.
> 
> All this is good. Now for a bit of controversy.
> 
> I'm not very happy about how AUR works for us. We get good PKGBUILDs and
> rather painless installation through yaourt, but it feels quite clumsy
> to me. For
> at least the following reasons:
> 
> 1) When we update ghc, there's no good way to update all the packages in AUR
> that depend on it. Best way to cleanup is pacman -Rc cabal-install, which kinda
> works but... And if I go back to the other ghc version (like I often did when
> playing with 6.8.2 and 6.10.1), my old packages are lost.
> 
> 2) Pacman just doesn't support the sort of versioning we'd need for
> this. By principle.
> 
> 3) yaourt often builds dependencies twice. Perhaps just a simple bug in yaourt.
> 
> 
> There's a simple solution to all these problems: for packages outside
> the Haskell Platform,
> we start using cabal-install. This has worked for me very well, and
> I'm not sure if
> I see why we should have Arch packages for everything. Of course also
> we would have
> some higher profile stuff in extra (like darcs) and community (like xmonad).
> 
> Any feelings? Rest assured, I'm not gonna go at this blindly.
> 
> --vk (dons an asbestos suit)
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