[Haskell-cafe] [Yesod] Re: Yesod and dependencies hell

[Michael Snoyman]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Joachim Breitner <nomeata at debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 09.02.2012, 11:39 +0000 schrieb Chris Dornan:
>> (I do think that we could be delivering the tools with a little more
>> packaging that could significantly help with these situations. I have
>> found them to be highly useful in any case.)
>
> if you are content with not always having the very latest versions, you
> can use your distribution’s packages. Distributions tend to provide
> exactly one (well, at most one :-)) version of each hackage library, and
> they all go well together.
>
> But then, for a few more days, Debian sid is broken due to the GHC 7.4.1
> transition...
>
> Greetings,
> Joachim

Firstly, Yesod 0.10 is out, so if you upgrade, there shouldn't be any
more dependency hell. I'm highly optimistic that there won't be much
more of this kind of pain in the future.

As far as using distribution packages: I've recommended against it in
the past, due to the combination of Yesod's speed of development and
the lack of package coverage. However, we're getting to a point now
where Yesod development is stabilizing on solid APIs, and the
distribution packages are beginning to cover many more dependencies.
Perhaps by Yesod 1.0 (hopefully available next month), it will be a
real possibility to depend entirely on distribution packages. I might
start to experiment with that myself soon, don't be surprised if you
hear some questions from me.

Michael