[Haskell-cafe] Hackage -> MacPorts?

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Thu Sep 4 20:55:32 EDT 2008


On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 20:08 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 4:14 PM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> So Haskell developers still have to manage everything themselves.
> That's probably reasonable.
> 
> What happens when you upgrade GHC? The problem MacPorts has is that
> the libraries are still listed as installed, even though they are no
> longer registered or useable.

Gentoo provides a ghc-updater program that re-installs all the
registered libraries for the new ghc. It's based off of a similar system
used in Gentoo for managing major version upgrades in Python so perhaps
MacPorts has something similar you could adapt. Basically it searches
through the installed haskell packages to find the ones registered with
the older compiler and then works out what order to re-install them in
and then does it. So it's not fully automatic as users have to run this
program manually after upgrading ghc, but it's not too painful.

Duncan



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