Packages in GHC 6.6

[Brian Hulley]

Simon Marlow wrote:
> If the base package is upgraded without also replacing the other
> libraries... this is where it gets really tricky.  Binary
> dependencies between library code tend to be very deep due to
> cross-module inlining and optimisations, so right now the chances of
> upgrading base without replacing everything else are almost zero.  To
> be able to do this I believe we have to track very carefully the
> API/ABI that a package is exposing, so that we can be sure that a
> replacement is truly compatible.  This may mean restricting
> optimisations across package boundaries.

I think it would be a great pity to sacrifice any optimizations, if it was 
at all possible to simply reconfigure/rebuild/reinstall all the existing 
packages on one's system after upgrading ghc.

As long as there was a tool to automatically do this it wouldn't be a big 
deal.

Perhaps packages which are not in ghc core which depend on the RTS (perhaps 
indirectly via other C libs they link to which call into Haskell) could be 
explicitly marked as such, so the user could manually check to see if the 
package had been tested with the latest ghc, or if there was an updated 
version to download (hopefully this could be automated using a central 
database of all known packages).

Regards, Brian.
-- 
Logic empowers us and Love gives us purpose.
Yet still phantoms restless for eras long past,
congealed in the present in unthought forms,
strive mightily unseen to destroy us.

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