[Haskell] Re: Trying to install binary-0.4

[Udo Stenzel]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> New tarball releases of Cabal-1.2.1, bytestring-0.9, binary-0.4.1, tar
> and others (zlib, bzlib, iconv) will appear on hackage in the next few
> days.

I just tried one of them, iconv.  First it wants a recent cabal; that's
fine, I installed the darcs version.  Then I get this:

| Codec/Text/IConv.hs:64:17:
|     Could not find module `Data.ByteString':
|           it is a member of package bytestring-0.9, which is hidden

Okay, it obviously tries to be smart, but doesn't know that I upgraded
to a separate ByteString library.  So I take out the gunk about
'flag(bytestring-in-base)' and try again:

| Setup: At least the following dependencies are missing:
|     base <2.0||>=2.2

Of course that was to be expected, since I have base-2.0 hacked to not
get in conflict with bytestring-0.9, and you (Duncan) couldn't possibly
anticipate this (or could you?).  Now what am I supposed to do?  Give my
messed up base a new version number?  (Which one?)  Rewrite every single
cabal file, hoping that they never become Turing complete turning the
exercise into a reverse engineering fest rivaling the ICFP contest?
Bite the bullet and install GHC from darcs?

For the time being, I'll go with 'ghc --make'.  And I think that cabal
configurations are an exceptionally bad idea carried to perfection.
They make things worse, not better.  (And that's just GHC 6.6... I don't
want to even think about what happens on Hugs, JHC and YHC.)

What would it take to talk you into giving up on supporting the broken
base-2.0 and incorporating a patch to unbreak it into the bytestring
setup?  Can I stop the insanity by simply writing that patch?


> So all will not be plain sailing for the first few weeks after
> ghc-6.8 comes out as maintainers update their packages. People will have
> to be patient and/or stick to ghc-6.6 for a bit.

Okay, so now we have *three* almost-stable versions of GHC in wide
circulation, all of them broken in different ways with respect to cabal
packages.  I feel tears welling up...


-Udo
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