[Haskell-cafe] Hackage on Linux

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Tue Aug 24 10:19:11 EDT 2010


On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:18, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am Dienstag, den 24.08.2010, 09:30 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:
>> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 06:50, Mathew de Detrich <deteego at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > - in some situations doing a general update with arch (through clyde or
>> > packer)  breaks ghc (last time it happened packer tried to uninstall/update
>> > arch packages which failed because those packages had dependencies. The
>> > files got removed but since unregister failed ghc thought they still
>> > existed)
>>
>> This is arguably an error in the Arch packages.  The dependencies aren't quite
>> as strict as they really should be.  I've taken the approach of never letting
>> pacman update any haskell-* package.  Instead I do a small song-and-dance
>> where I first remove the packages in question, and any package that depends on
>> them, then I re-install what I just removed.
>
> In Debian, this cannot happen any more, as libraries are tied to the
> packages of their dependencies via the ABI hash used by ghc. (If I am
> correctly understanding the symptoms). So using apt-get upgrade will never
> break any Debian-installed packages.

Yes, I've argued for a Debian-style policy for dependencies in Arch, but
apparently people don't find it worth it.

I'm not sure whether it'd even be possible to do the same thing for packages
from AUR though, which is where most of the Hackage packages are.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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