[arch-haskell] Re: Heads-up: ghc-7.0.1-1 => testing

[Peter Simons]

Hi Rémy,

 > As you may have noticed, ghc-7* was moved to [staging] by other devs.
 > I began rebuilding current versions of libraries when they were
 > compatible. I would like your approval to do the following:
 >
 > deepseq 1.1.1.0 -> 1.1.0.1
 > mtl 1.1.0.2 -> 1.1.1.0

personally, I am all for it. I'd very much like to have GHC7, and those
updates seem comparatively minor, so I'd say go for it!

At the same time, I am a little concerned about the state of [extra]. There
are problems that have been known for several weeks, yet they don't seem to
get fixed. That makes me wonder about our priorities.

The most annoying bug so far is that haskell-tar hasn't been built with
--enable-shared. This means that no package that depends on haskell-tar --
such as haskell-archlinux -- can be built with --enable-shared. This is
probably not a big issue for random ArchLinux users, but it sure does make
my life inconvenient, because I'm trying to work with the latest version of
our tool-chain, which sets --enable-shared by default.

Also, several packages don't include Haddock documentation, such as
haskell-regex-base, haskell-regex-compat, haskell-regex-posix, and
haskell-hunit. Again, this is not exactly a show-stopper grade problem, but
every so often I do work on a laptop without network access, and having the
reference documentation installed locally on disk is quite helpful in that
situation.

I have reported those problems on this list before, and I have also filed
bug reports in the ArchLinux tracker, but I cannot seem to get a response.
So, if I had to choose between an ArchDev working on fixing those problems
and an ArchDev working on GHC7 support, I'd rather have the problems in the
existing package base fixed fist. Just my 2 cents ...

Take care,
Peter