[Haskell-cafe] ANN: wavconvert 0.1.1

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 18:22 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:

> Tim wins the prize for the 500th Haskell package in Arch Linux,
> 
>     http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=19205


Which, I should like to note, demonstrates why the original Cabal
design[1] was basically right[2] in that it allows this kind of
automated translation into native packages.

You cannot do that with autoconf.

The other distros are following a similar course though not yet quite as
successfully as Don has demonstrated for Arch. There are similar
translation tools for Gentoo, Debian and RPM-based distros with varying
levels of sophistication and automation. I think the folks who hack on
these translation tools should get together and share code and
experience so we can all achieve better levels of automation. The
highest levels of automation will also require more centralised QA on
hackage. That's where we should be going.

Duncan

[1] http://haskell.org/cabal/proposal/index.html
[2] I'm not at all claiming credit for that design. That was decided
well before I started hacking on Cabal.