Dynamic libraries by default and GHC 7.8

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Dienstag, den 27.11.2012, 21:57 -0500 schrieb Tyson Whitehead:
> I was so excited for a bit thinking that this would finally mean that
> Debian would move to a dynamic system.  Every haskell binary being 10s
> of MBs (e.g., pandoc = 25MB executable) makes it look kind of bad.

its not like dynamic libraries make the bytes disappear – the
(non-Haskell-developer) user who wants to use pandoc still has to
install all these bytes, but now they just come split in a dozen of
packages.

Or gix-annex, a more and more popular Haskell application: Building it
requires 94 Haskell library packages. Now imagine this to be dynamically
built: Now installing git-annex will require 94 strage sounding packages
that the user most likely has no idea what they are about, and chances
are high that there is no other packages requiring these shared
libraries, making most of the benefit of shared libraries moot.

Now, if Haskell was as popular as C and the user _would_ run several
different processes at once that could share the shared library, this
would be interesting. At the moment, I do not see how dynamically built
Haskell programs are in the interest of our user.

> I was left with the impression that we were going to have this back in
> 2010 just as soon as squeeze got out the door...  :)

It seems that noone cared enough about that, but any help is welcome.
Two things to do: Patch haskell-devscripts to build the -dyn ways, and
manually adding the additional package stance to the debian/contol files
(if it is to be decided that the -dyn libraries should reside in
packages of their own. If we decide to include them in the regular
packages, this is not needed.)

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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/attachments/20121128/bae18b87/attachment.pgp>