Haskell related Debian packages

[Richard Braakman]

On Thu, Dec 12, 2002 at 11:36:59AM -0500, haskell-cafe-admin@haskell.org wrote:
> The package could install binary files, but then it would build-depend
> on ghc which doesn't exist for several Debian platforms.  So I guess
> it could check to see if ghc is installed on the building computer and
> stick binaries in /usr/lib.

You can have architecture-specific build dependencies, like this:

  Build-Depends: ghc [i386], debhelper

You could build with ghc on exactly the platforms where it is
available, though you'd have to maintain that list of platforms by hand.

> Another option would be to compile packages for GHC in the post-install
> script if ghc is installed, and stick those installed files in
> /usr/lib, and the .hs files in /usr/share/hugs98/extentions if hugs is
> installed.

I don't like this.  It tends to get complicated fast, it's fragile,
and it's not nice when installing or removing packages.  I'm always
annoyed when the emacs packages do this.  Since we only have to
support two Haskell compilers, I think it's reasonable to just
provide object code for both of them.  (It's different for emacsen,
where there are lots of incompatible flavours, and maintainers aren't
expected to have all of them installed.)

Richard Braakman