[Haskell-cafe] Hackage -> MacPorts?

Don Stewart dons at galois.com
Thu Sep 4 16:14:29 EDT 2008


duncan.coutts:
> On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 12:09 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Duncan Coutts
> > <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> > > That's exactly the same situation as with Gentoo. We provide a
> > > ghc-updater program that re-installs all the existing libs for the new
> > > ghc. Gentoo also only provides libs for ghc.
> > 
> > That's more convenient than re-installing all the libs by hand. I
> > guess that's good enough for non-developer use; someone who just wants
> > to install a program doesn't need to have more than one version of GHC
> > installed, for example. It pains me to see the assumption that Haskell
> > = GHC built in to our distribution methods, though.
> 
> Yeah, I know. It's really a limitation of systems like Gentoo. Gentoo's
> position is that you should not encode things like this into the package
> name and provides a 'slotting' mechanism to allow multiple versions,
> however it's not quite expressive enough to slot on the haskell
> implementation and still get all the lib deps right.
> 
> > RPM apparently handles this by having the library packages install
> > themselves under new names that include the environment name and
> > version. I assume Nix can handle multiple Haskell environments.
> 
> Right. And yes, Nix can do everything because it's jolly cunning and
> takes the functional/persistent approach.
> 
> > Does anyone know whether arch linux and debian can handle multiple
> > Haskell environments?
> 
> Debian does, again by encoding the haskell implementation name into the
> package name. I think arch only provides libraries for ghc.
> 

That's right, on Arch we just go for what people actually need, i.e.:

    1) 1 compiler, GHC
    2) GHC comes with the core+extra set, so they're implicitly available
    3) all other libs are "haskell-(map toLower packagename)"

The complication to support multiple implementations et al isn't done by
any other language group (i.e. libs aren't bundled for multiple python
impls, or different C compilers), so I don't see why we should waste
time on that either. Pragmatic, I know.

-- Don


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