[Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch

[Clark Gaebel]

Personally, I like the latest version of GHC being in the repository, as
that's the version I normally use.

What packages aren't working for you on 7.6? I find that they get updated
pretty quickly, and if you run into any that aren't, feel free to send the
authors a pull request. Almost everything is on github.

    - Clark

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 4:49 PM, <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> wrote:

> Hello,
> Who is in charge of the ghc and haskell packages on Arch linux?  The
> current system isn't working.
>
> Arch linux tends to update packages very quickly.
>
> For ghc, always having the latest ghc isn't a good thing.  At least if you
> actually want to get some work done.  A majority of the time the latest GHC
> is unusable. This is because the packages in hackage simply don't keep up.
> With the current ghc version(7.6.1) even some basic packages in hackage are
> not upgraded yet.
>
> Right now, a large number of other haskell related packages are in the
> arch repos. Other than gtk2hs, I think these packages are pointless
> duplications.  In the other cases, it has been my experience that it is
> simpler to maintain these packages through cabal rather than through
> pacman.  Support for these packages in Arch should probably be dropped.
>
> If you want to get work done in Arch with haskell, you should only install
> ghc and cabal-install(right now, you'll have to search the Internet for the
> old binaries, because the arch repos usually don't keep the old versions
> around).  Then you should add these packages to "IgnorePkg =" in
> pacman.conf  this way things won't break every couple of months.  You can
> then choose to upgrade when you wish.
>
> I hope that someone who is involved with the haskell Arch stuff reads
> this.  The current model needs to be rethought.  Linux should be sane by
> default, but I've lost many many hours learning that arch's relationship
> with haskell is not so :(  Probably the best solution would be to make Arch
> automatically keep two versions of ghc around at any given time.
>
> Thank you for your time,
> Timothy Hobbs
>
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