Build failures in packages built with GHC 6.6

[Duncan Coutts]

Hi folks,

Over the weekend Lennart Kolmodin tested all of Gentoo's Haskell
packages with the latest GHC 6.6 RC snapshot. Here is his report of what
failed, and how:

http://www.haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/projects/GHC-6.5-failures.html

You'll note that there are some common ones, like Data.FiniteMap going
away and the old API in Data.Set disappearing. There seemed to be
several programs which used the old lang or text packages. The change in
the array bounds api broke some things. Text.Regex moved into a
different package. Most of these look fairly trivial. Class instance
changes broke a couple packages, which might be a bit more tricky to
fix.

One Cabal api change broke one package, again easily fixable. We made
some Cabal modules that had been private by convention properly private
(ei Distribution.Compat.*). This broke lhs2tex. I'm not sure exactly
what Cabal scripts should be using for portable file path handling since
Setup.hs modules are not supposed to have external dependencies on other
packages (otherwise there's a chicken and egg problem with compiling
Setup.hs).

Advice here would be apreciated, I could let
Distribution.Compat.FilePath remain public in this release and seek a
better solution for the next release.

BTW, you can see the complete set of Gentoo's Haskell packages here:
http://www.haskell.org/~gentoo/gentoo-haskell/
(mostly under dev-haskell/)
Gentoo users & developers can use this package collection as a portage
overlay.

Duncan
(wearing his Cabal release manager hat and his Gentoo hat)