[arch-haskell] Further to the discussion in pull request for yi

[Magnus Therning]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 04:55:14PM +0100, Peter Simons wrote:
> Hi Magnus,
> 
>> What do changes do you propose we make to our tool chain to support
>> patching of packages?
> 
> the cabal2arch utility (or rather, the underlying archlinux library)
> needs the ability to accept three kind of patches and bake them into
> the generated output:
> 
>  1) diffs that ought to be applied to the Cabal file before
>     processing,
> 
>  2) diffs that ought to be applied to the generated PKGBUILD
>     after processing, and
> 
>  3) diffs that ought to be applied to the extracted source code
>     as part of the build.
> 
> Type (1) can be used to fix omissions in the Cabal file that
> affect the generated PKGBUILD, like the kind of under-specified
> dependencies currently exhibited by haskell-{opengl,glut}.
> 
> Type (2) can be used to fix incorrectly generated PKGBUILD files
> like the one for haskell-platform, which comes out having a
> non-existent homepage URL.
> 
> Type (3) can be used to perform the kind of build-time fixes that
> we currently need for haskell-yesod and/or yi.
> 
> A combination of all three of those should allow us to build just
> about anything, no matter how broken the package is.

All of this does indeed sound like something we'd need to make sure
cabal2arch can re-generate the currently hand-modified stuff.  It also
mostly seem to be stuff that can be, at least in the short term,
handled by a wrapper script around cabal2arch.

I do however not think that this will improve the scalability more
than marginally; we swap maintaining manually modified PKGBUILDS for
maintaining manually created patches.  So unless someone convinces me
otherwise I will continue to argue that we should avoid packages that
are broken and require manual modifications.

/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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