[Freebsd-haskell] Cabal Ports Reworked & Committed

[Gabor PALI]

Dear all,

As you might have seen, yesterday I finally committed my changes
regarding the Cabal-based Haskell ports [1].  Hopefully both QAT and
pointyhat will like it, and we can start to catching up with updating
and adding new ports in the haskell category.

You can submit updates in any form you like, for instance via:

- GNATS PR [2] (preferred).
- Direct email to FreeBSD committers [3].
- This list.

Please, try to use hsporter [4] and send patches or tell me about your
experiences! :)


I also would like to call everybody for discussion on how to proceed.  I
have made some preliminary experiments with gitting and package building
on our own, so I think it slowly becomes possible to implement a more
open and fast-paced development for FreeBSD Haskell ports and packages
with occasionally merging back to the FreeBSD Ports Collection as Samy
Al Bahra has already imagined it about a year ago [5].

In my opinion, we should still stick to the original idea, and host a
public git repository somewhere where we provide access to all
interested contributors.  But I propose to start small: use only two
branches in the beginning.

- The "master" branch would be the place for the daily-updated vanilla
FreeBSD ports tree, used for periodic (perhaps weekly) internal merging.

- The "ports" branch would be where you can add and update your ports. 
It would serve two purposes:

    * Doing "crawling" package building which means this branch will be
checked out on my box on a regular basis, and used for building more or
less up-to-date packages for all supported versions (7.2, 7.3, 8.0,
6-stable, 7-stable, 8-stable, 9-current) on all supported platforms
(i386, amd64).  Proper distribution of these packages is not solved yet,
but it can be solved I think.

    * A reference point where FreeBSD committers can merge to the
FreeBSD ports tree.  You may view it as a form of batch submissions.


Notes:

- For the best results (and sparing some wasted cycles and space when
building packages) we should really focus only on hackages which are
valuable, i.e. you use it or want to use it.  Check out Don Stewart's
nice statistics if you are in doubt [6] (especially the fields "Votes"
and "Downloads").

- Cabal and cabal-install should not be ported in this style as they are
interfering with native FreeBSD Haskell ports.  I am working on a
separate port for Haskell Platform which includes them (and GHC 6.12.1),
hopefully it will be available soon.

- We should always stick to a reliable version of GHC (which is 6.10.4
at the moment), if you need the latest stable one you can download it as
a vanilla binary distribution right from the GHC home page because
FreeBSD is a Tier-1 platform now [7].  For the really impatient, there
will be daily current and stable snapshots of GHC published soon.

- For QAing I can offer Tinderbox support for a limited number of
contributors.


Please comment on it.


Cheers,
:g


[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/cvs-ports/2010-May/194540.html
[2] http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html
[3] mailto:haskell at freebsd.org
[4] http://code.haskell.org/~pgj/projects/hsporter/
[5]
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/freebsd-haskell/2009-January/000016.html
[6] http://www.galois.com/~dons/arch-haskell-status.html
[7] http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_6_12_2.html#freebsd