[arch-haskell] Simple, general template for cabal packages?

[Jeff Johnson]

Hi everyone!

I've been becoming more and more dependent on Haskell programs lately.
There aren't many popular ones (yet!), but those that do exist seem
uncommonly good and have quickly become core parts of my workflow: pandoc,
gitit, git-annex, and hoodle are the main ones so far, plus maybe xmonad.

But they also seem idiosyncratic and hard to install: builds often fail,
pacman spits tons of errors even when upgrading successfully, you sometimes
have to reinstall them all at once to maintain compatibility, etc. I've
read these pages:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.arch-linux/1743
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haskell_package_guidelines

And I'm confused about the point of separate [haskell-*] repositories. Why
all the overhead? The simplest thing I could imagine working would be a
PKGBUILD with a "snapshot" of compatible dependency versions. Then you
could do a sandboxed build from scratch each time. Somehing like:

_pkgname=hoodle
pkgname=$_pkgname-cabal
...
makedepends=('cabal-git') # sandboxes introduced in 1.18
_cabaldepends=(
  ...
  'coroutine-object-0.2.0.0'
  'hoodle-types-0.2.2'
  'xournal-types-0.5.0.2'
  'hoodle-builder-0.2.2.0'
  'hoodle-parser-0.2.2'
  'xournal-parser-0.5.0.2'
  ...
)
build() {
  ...
  cabal-git sandbox init
  cabal-git update
  cabal-git install $_cabaldepends $_pkgname-$pkgver
  ...
}

The only downside would be a lot of compilation, but that could be solved
the same way it is for non-Haskell packages: popular ones get adopted into
[community]. Does that sound sensible? Or am I on the way to deciding I
should contribute to an existing repository? Should I just try it and see?

Oh and apologies if this has been answered; I just joined the mailing list.
Jeff
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