[Freebsd-haskell] What's the point of the cabal freebsd ports?

[Tim Matthews]

Hi Gabor thanks for the reply.


> ....................Great!  Yesterday I was not so lucky when I wanted to
> install gitit via
> cabal-install (and I needed to patch strict-concurreny-0.2.3 and
> SMTPClient-1.0.1 a bit to make the things work).
>
>
Is this always the best way to do it as opposed to submitting a patch that
makes it freebsd compatible to the port maintainer?


> My plans regarding addressing these
> problems are as follows:
>
> - Introduce a new framework for hackage ports (enables faster updating).
>
> - Introduce an automatic hackage to port converter using the new
> framework (enables faster porting).
>

When a haskell developer announces some new package and it's available on
hackage, it would be great if it could be installed instantly despite being
a freebsd user. Your blog post points out that cabal isn't everything but
how fast would this 'faster updating' be. If we could completely remove the
human from the system and have a tool that monitors hackage and creates
ports as it happens then it would be fast enough. It wouldn't be tested but
at least proper port management, uninstallation etc work with it until it
then becomes modified to include patches.

One thing I think we really cannot have is the dual of freebsd ports as-well
as cabal install packages. Even if I try to install just using cabal install
there will probably be a port that depends on a hs-* port, it will then try
to install this but it already exists in ~/.cabal/ and this we be a big
source of problems. Therefore if we want any freebsd ports of hackages then
I think completly automated creation of up to date hackages is an absolute
must.


> - Update lang/ghc to GHC 6.12.x, if all the (sup)ported hackages build
> with it correctly.
>
>
I think some of the packages on hackage still don't build with ghc 6.12.1.
Also some (or at least 1) of the freebsd hs-* ports don't build. I think the
port hs-datetime was the one I couldn't build and this is still using
6.10.4.

Also have you looked at how the other major operating systems such as
redhat, ubuntu, opensuse, solaris, archlinux etc are doing this? Are they
all just making do with having all there hackages out of package management?
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