[Haskell-cafe] Re: Poll: Do you need to be able to build darcs from source on GHC 6.6?

[Trent W. Buck]

Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> I'd just like to point out (again ;-) ) than it's not that hard to
> support older platforms. The only constraint is that people not squeal
> at the sight of bundled code. The bundling can be done in such a way
> that it's not a maintenance burden, indeed it can remove the need to
> maintain internal equivalents of external libs.
>
> For example for an external package foo, we could put the latest stable
> version of it in lib/foo and in the .cabal file say something like:

As the Debian packager, including convenience copies of build dependency
libraries in the stable tarballs increases my workload because

- Debian Policy requires that I not use them.  If the ./configure
  prefers the convenience copies over the ones found on the system, that
  means I have to write extra code in debian/rules to force the use of
  the system copies.

- Debian Policy requires that all files in the source tarball -- even
  libraries that I don't actually compile against -- have their
  copyright and license information declared in debian/copyright.  This
  means that even if "everybody knows libfoo is GPL", I have to audit
  the convenience copy to make sure that every significant work (read:
  file) in the convenience copy has a clear license declaration to that
  effect, and to document any exceptions.

  Alternatively, I can create my own stable tarball of darcs by
  unpacking the one Eric makes, removing the convenience copies, and
  then re-tarring it.  But this is fiddly and normally only done when
  the upstream tarball contains work that Debian won't or can't
  (legally) distribute.

Therefore while I understand the argument for convenience copies, I'd be
obliged if they were kept to a minimum.