Contrib packages

[Brent A. Fulgham]

On Wednesday 07 May 2003 10:00 am, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> For Debian, I think a nice solution might be to have a package of the
> library building software which includes a way for implementation and
> library packages to register with it. Then, when a new library is
> installed it would be rebuilt for any implementations installed and
> registered, and when GHC is upgraded it would rebuild all the libraries
> installed and registered. This nicely solves the problem of changing
> binary formats. The only subtlety I can see is making sure things get
> built in the right order when installing multiple packages at once.

This sounds a lot like the Common Lisp compiler system.  I don't know
much about CL, but I do know that when I had SBCL installed for a brief
while, if I updated a CL library, it would recompile the library for SBCL.

This is obviously a bit different than Haskell, since SBCL uses an Image
file that must be updated periodically to use the new functionality, but
perhaps we could make a similar mechanism for Haskell.

-Brent