[Haskell-cafe] Listing native package requirements based on cabal information

[Chris Warburton]

Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> writes:

> Besides naming convention issues (which could be compensated for with
> lookup dictionaries; a brute-force solution, sure, but better than
> nothing), a bigger problem is that sometimes packages don't match 1:1
> between distros, so one distro might just provide one monolithic
> foobar-dev package, while another might split it up into
> foobar-client-dev and foobar-server-dev, while yet another might provide
> more than one alternative.
>
> TL;DR: I think if we could just get a list of required native packages,
> we'd be a long way.

Package naming/splitting/etc. is the one reason that working across
distros is difficult. RPM/deb/etc. are trivial to convert between and
most other incompatibilities have known solutions for working around
(eg. look at any standalone app which offers a tar.gz).

I've been down this route before, and it inevitably ends up checking
individual filenames. Many RPMs depend on filenames rather than other
RPMs. PackageKit tries to apply this in a more format-neutral way.

It was a few years ago that I last looked, but the "just" is unwarranted
since this is *the* difficult problem. Tools like alien and checkinstall
can do the rest.

Regards,
Chris