ghc 6.6 Debian packages

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 08:36 +0200, Ketil Malde wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 12:11 -0400, Matthew Danish wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 11:15:03AM +0200, Christian Maeder wrote:
> 
> > > Is there no way to provide all the extra libs in one debian package for ghc?
> 
> > It may be possible to create a "package" which depends on all normal
> > "extras" but that seems counter-productive.
> 
> Au contraire - I think that is a great way to go about it, and it is how
> a lot of things get done.  Meta-packages include desktop environments
> (e.g. KDE and Gnome) and the Linux kernel (e.g. linux-generic).

However those projects clearly define which components make up the
whole. We do not. There are the core packages that come with ghc and
then there are all the other packages you can find on hackage. The
'extra' packages is just a bunch that used to be distributed with ghc.
They're not intended to be canonical as far as I know. My understanding
is that that 'extra' tarball is just a transitional thing provided for
convenience until hackage gets up to speed.

If people want to go and define some standard distribution of packages
then that's another matter, but that's something that should be driven
centrally rather than each of the various distro maintainers picking
some arbitrary set of packages.

Duncan
(wearing his Gentoo packager hat)