library packages and Debian

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 01:24:40PM +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> > No.  Debian only allows build-depends on a per-source package basis, so
> > this would mean that the library would be restricted to platforms on which
> > all haskell compilers exist.
> 
> ghc6 build-depends on gcc-2.95 [sparc] meaning gcc-2.95 is needed on
> sparc only.

Ah, I didn't realize you could do that... but this would mean every library
package would have encoded into it which compilers are avaliable on which
platforms, which seems like a waste.  I guess a better way to do this would
be to have a package "all-haskell-compilers" which on each platform depends
on all available haskell compilers, and then library packages could just
depend on that.

> The problem as I see it is that either you have to make the build-deps
> stricter than they need to be to force things to build with the latest
> compiler version or you need to wait for the buildds to build the new
> compiler on all arches before uploading the libraries. This wouldn't be
> so bad if the chances of all the buildds actually working at any given
> time was better, although a binary upload could be done by hand for the
> one or two broken ones.

Another problem (and this is *very* debian-specific) would be that *every*
haskell library and compiler would have to simultaneously move from
unstable into testing, along with all libraries that have haskell
bindings.

> The first option means that someone who has an older compiler
> (backporting to stable, don't want to upgrade to the latest version for
> some reason, or whatever) can't tell the difference between a library
> trying to build with this version and one which won't build with earlier
> versions.

I would assume that using option one the depends would be used to indicate
what kind of compiler it works with (besides being used to indicate what
-dev packages are required).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org