Contrib packages

[Isaac Jones]

Alastair Reid <alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk> writes:

> - we need someone who knows about and cares about Debian to produce debian 
> packages

I wouldn't mind being the Debian person for this task, and there are
several others who are probably willing and qualified, but I have been
hesitant to package Haskell libraries for Debian until some of the
issues raised in the Library Infrastructure thread are resolved.
(This is probably not a good attitude on my part, but at least I'm
interested in helping to resolve them.)

As a reminder, there seme to be two ways to package Haskell libraries
on Debian, 1) have a large number of packages (hunit-ghc4, hunit-ghc5,
hunit-ghc4-prof, hunit-ghc5-prof, hunit-hugs, hunit-nhc, etc) or 2)
build libraries at install time a la elisp.

In particular, I can immagine a Haskell Library Infrastructure which
makes it easy to automatically generate debian binary packages for all
of the compilers that are installed on the build machine.

Not to bring it up again, but a distutils type system like Python's
(with some modification) seems to solve both the "Library
Infrastructure" problem, and the "Contrib packages" problem.

Also, it should be noted that there's a place in sorceforge for
Haskell Libraries that might be useful in the interim.  You can read
more about all of this on the wiki:
http://www.haskell.org/hawiki/LibrariesAndTools

peace,

isaac