[Hugs-users] Hugs snapshot

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2005 at 03:32:45PM +0900, Jens Petersen wrote:
> I finally packaged hugs98 for Fedora Haskell,
> starting boldly with the latest development snapshot 20050308! :)

Thanks.  Isaac Jones has packaged the same snapshot for Debian,
and it's already built on 10 architectures (mipsel yet to come).

The only problem with that snapshot that I'm aware of is with locales
on Fedora (reported by Victor Secarin).  The fix (set LC_ALL=C) is in
the 20050310 snapshot.

Please test this snapshot.  It has several improvements over the
Nov2003 release, notably Unicode characters (contributed by Dmitry
Golubovsky) and support for the Cabal packaging system (see
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4/html/Cabal/).

Unfortunately Windows support lags behind.  It might build on MinGW+MSYS,
but I haven't tried it.  Certainly Hugs+Cabal won't work very well
on Windows.  The library build system for Hugs is now based on Cabal,
which has the potential to make building on Windows easier, after more
mork on the Windows+Hugs+Cabal combination.  Volunteers welcome.

I think there should be an interim release for Unix users even if Windows
isn't ready, to get some experience with the new features.

> Lightly tested: let me know if you find any packaging problems.

The Hugs libraries build system does autodetection: the packages X11,
HGL, OpenGL, GLUT and OpenAL are built only if the relevant C libraries
are present on the build machine.  You probably want to ensure that
they are present, and then build multiple packages (so the basic hugs
package doesn't depend on those libraries).  One possibility is hugs-hgl
(X11 and HGL) and hugs-hopengl (OpenGL, GLUT and OpenAL).  That groups
together packages with the same author and licence.  Another would be
to have 5 extra packages, but that seems overkill.