[Haskell] base libraries

[Ian Lynagh]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 05:13:24PM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
> 
> I am sure that this has already been considered somehow, but could
> somebody be so kind to give a short explanation of the plans in this
> area?

There are a number of things going on here. If SuSE has an RPM for hnop
then yes, using yast is definitely the way to go.

If it doesn't then you can either tell the magic rpm-maker to convert
hnop-0.1.tar.gz into an rpm and install that as above, or you can tell
cabal to install it into /usr/local. This last option has the downside
that yast/rpm won't know it exists, and so can't use it to know the deps
of something else are satisfied (although presumably nothing will depend
on it as it wasn't packaged), and it could stop working at a later date
if a package it depends on that was provided by an rpm is removed.

What hackage provides is a place to keep all the tarballs, a way to view
and search for them and a way to upload new packages and new versions.
Then people making SuSE rpms, or people looking for things that aren't
packaged for SuSE, know where to go.

It also provides a set of packages that can be used by cabal-get, for
SuSE users to get packages that have not been made into SuSE RPMs, as
well as for people who do not use a package manager (e.g. students on
uni machines that they don't have root on).

In the future we can add things like the ability to rate packages, mark
packages as bitrotted, automated testing that packages compile and their
testsuites pass, mailing lists, darcs repos, bug trackers etc for
packages in hackage.


Thanks
Ian