Dynamic libraries by default and GHC 7.8

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 27.11.2012, 14:52 +0000 schrieb Ian Lynagh:
> The various issues are described in a wiki page here:
>     http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicByDefault
> 
> If you have a few minutes to read it then we'd be glad to hear your
> feedback, to help us in making our decisions

here comes the obligatory butting in by the Debian Haskell Group:

Given the current sensitivity of the ABI hashes we really do not want to
have Programs written in Haskell have a runtime dependency on all the
included Haskell libraries. So I believe we should still link Haskell
programs statically in Debian.

Hence, Debian will continue to provide its libraries built the static
way.

Building them also in the dynamic way for the sake of GHCi users seems
possible.

Open question: What should GHC on Debian do when building binaries,
given that all libraries are likely available in both ways – shared or
static. Shared means that all locally built binaries (e.g. xmonad!) will
suddenly break when the user upgrades its Haskell packages, as the
package management is ignorant of unpackaged, locally built programs.
I’d feel more comfortable if that could not happen.

Other open question: Should we put the dynamic libraries in the normal
libghc-*-dev package? Con: Package size doubles (and xmonad users are
already shocked by the size of stuff they need to install). Pro: It
cannot happen that I can build Foo.hs statically, but not load it in
GHCi, or vice-versa.

I still find it unfortunate that once cannot use the .so for static
linking as well, but that is a problem beyond the scope of GHC.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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