Libraries Digest, Vol 87, Issue 16

[Matthias Kilian]

Hi,

On Mon, Nov 08, 2010 at 06:58:52PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> >> http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages#PackageRequirements
> >
> > Well, the policy can be changed if necessary (not that I'm proposing that
> > here).
> > While packages may need to be present to build an application in the
> > platform, they don't necessarily need to be exposed as part of the platform.
> 
> That's true for binary packaging systems. It would not be true for
> source based ones e.g. gentoo, freebsd ports, macports or indeed
> someone starting with just ghc and using cabal to install the platform
> meta-package.

On the other hand, on those systems people would get all packages
(libraries and programs) required by the Haskell platform, plus
some additional ones. Wouldn't hurt too much, IMHO (allthough it
feels a little bit wrong if the platform would contain programs
that can't be built with only the platform).

As I'm doing OpenBSD stuff, where things are a little bit different
(we have a ports tree for building stuff from sources, *but* we
also provide binary packages and recommend and expect ordinary users
to use those): if OpenBSD would provide meta-packages (which it
doesn't do yet), there would be a meta-package `haskell-platform'
which run- and lib-dependencies on all the nice stuff required by
the platform, and at the same time build-depends on stuff only
required for *building* the platform.

But I readlly don't know what would happen wrt shared libraries
(which are supported now in GHC on most archs, AFAIK).

Ciao,
	Kili