more on GHC 6.4 Debian packages

[Ian Lynagh]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 10:56:40PM +0200, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 28. Juli 2005 20:46 schrieb Iavor Diatchki:
> 
> > I am using the "testing" distribution, which appears to have something
> > called ghc-cvs and ghc 6.2 but not ghc 6.4.
> 
> I didn't know about ghc-cvs so far.  The idea of ghc-cvs looks a bit ugly.  
> Why would the Debian project want to have an unstable GHC version in stable?  
> In addition I wonder why ghc-cvs from stable is one year old.

ghc-cvs runs the testsuite while building, so if any of the tests don't
terminate (and some of them don't on at least some arches) then the
package doesn't build.

Thus there is a timeout program that kills tests if they take too long.

However, the timeout program tickles known bugs in Linux 2.4 on hppa
(and possibly unknown bugs on ia64, as discussed briefly on ghc-cvs).

So the upshot is that I haven't been able to get a new ghc-cvs built
recently. I hope to look into this again after sorting out everything
we've already talked about  :-)  Hopefully by then more of the relevant
machines will be on 2.6, too.

> > I am confused as to why ghc 6.4 is considered less stable then ghc-cvs
> > which presumably is changing more or less all the time.

If you install a package called ghc-cvs then you should expect things to
not necessarily work, regardless of whether it came from stable, testing
or unstable. A package called ghc6 from stable should actually work,
though.


Thanks
Ian