[Haskell-cafe] Hackage on Linux

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com
Tue Aug 24 22:03:23 EDT 2010


On 24 August 2010 21:18, 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.

Interesting; I've been discussing with Ciaran McCreesh on a
possibility of getting something like that into Paludis for use with
Exherbo (a few non-Haskell related things are starting to annoy me
with the petty politics, etc. of Gentoo and Exherbo has some really
nice ideas).  How exactly do you do this?  Register the ABI hash upon
installation and check if it ever changes?  Or is this all done when
you build the package since Debian uses binary packages?

> OTOH, you cannot expect Debian to always and immediately install the
> latest Cabal versions – there are possibly good reasons for not
> upgrading.

Yes, least of which is someone spending the time to notice that a
package is out of date and bothering to update it + test that update
(including any packages that depend upon it).

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com


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