[Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch

[timothyhobbs at seznam.cz]

I didn't wish to suggest that the latest version shouldn't be available.  If
you read my entire message, the suggestion I made, is that arch should 
install the latest with the next to latest in parallel and do so by default 
rather than as some weird and hacky work-around.




Sending pull requests is great.  But one shouldn't have to put their system 
back together after an upgrade.  You ask me what package has broken, but 
that's not important.  A package always breaks.  Right now, the situation, 
is that a haskell user on a completely standard setup, will type pacman -Syu
and end up with a non functioning build toolchain.  You can of course work 
to fix this toolchain, and send pull requests. But say it takes a week to 
update all the packages you use.  That's a week of delay to a project.  
Furthermore, it is not very efficient for me to go and upgrade other people'
s packages.  Often times on this list there have been discussions regarding 
the upper bounds on cabal packages.  Some people believe that the upper 
bounds should be removed entirely, while others believe that they should be 
an educated guess made by the developer.  Tweaking upper bounds when I'm not
the developer then makes my guessing all the less educated.  Me tweaking 
packages which I do not know and sending pull requests is not only going to 
cost me more time than it would cost the package author, it is likely to end
up with me making the wrong changes and lead to a reduction in the quality 
of the code.





  There seems to be a bit of a clash between ghc being a tool, and ghc being
a toy.  There need not be.  Your works-for-me is great but it is meaningless
to those of us who use ghc as a tool for larger projects.




Timothy



---------- Původní zpráva ----------
Od: Clark Gaebel <cgaebel at uwaterloo.ca>
Datum: 28. 10. 2012
Předmět: Re: [Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch
"
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
(mailto: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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