Debian library packaging? or, how to get a single deb to work for hugs/ghc/nhc?

[Andrew J Bromage]

G'day all.

On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 08:47:15AM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:

> In a nutshell: It doesn't work, even if only the patchlevel of GHC
> changes and the user-visible ABI stays the same.  As has been discussed
> several times, this is the price one has to pay for the heavy
> inter-module optimizations GHC does. And recompilation is not always an
> option, either, e.g. when the package in question has some native parts
> which rely on development stuff (headers, program generators, etc.) which
> is normally not installed on the target.

Requiring the headers/program generators/whatever isn't a big deal,
IMO.  Either you could make the packages depend on the appropriate
development packages, or you could package dependencies separately.

As for the inter-module optimisation problem, as other have
noted, this would not be an issue for stable packages, since
the environment that they depend on is stable.

I have a suspicion that some compiler help may go some way to solving
the problem in the long-run (e.g. if GHC told us what it actually
used rather than what it theoretically depends on), but I don't want
to go there yet.  Or probably ever.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage