[Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch

[Magnus Therning]

Hello Timothy,

Now I'm going to run the risk of upsetting you quite a bit by being
completely blunt.

You come across in your mail like someone who has thought through your
own situation, but fail to see the larger picture.  You do know *your*
Haskell needs, and you know what *you* would want from a project like
ArchHaskell.  Then however you completely fail to realise that these
are *your needs*, not anyone else's, but still you suggest that
ArchHaskelll is broken because it doesn't provide a system that solves
*your* problems.

I suggest you take your insights of your situation and try to find a
solution that works for you, and it sounds like you're on the way
already with cabal-install.  If you have suggestions on how to improve
ArchHaskell *within the goals of the project* (which includes the
general goals of ArchLinux) that would make ArchHaskell more usable to
you, then you are more than welcome.  However, if all you do is
suggest that we completely change the goals of ArchHaskell because
they don't align with your needs, then we thank you for your input,
but ask you to not hold your breath for any changes.

/M

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:49 PM,  <timothyhobbs at seznam.cz> wrote:
> Hello,
> Who is in charge of the ghc and haskell packages on Arch linux?  The current
> system isn't working.
>
> Arch linux tends to update packages very quickly.
>
> For ghc, always having the latest ghc isn't a good thing.  At least if you
> actually want to get some work done.  A majority of the time the latest GHC
> is unusable. This is because the packages in hackage simply don't keep up.
> With the current ghc version(7.6.1) even some basic packages in hackage are
> not upgraded yet.
>
> Right now, a large number of other haskell related packages are in the arch
> repos. Other than gtk2hs, I think these packages are pointless duplications.
> In the other cases, it has been my experience that it is simpler to maintain
> these packages through cabal rather than through pacman.  Support for these
> packages in Arch should probably be dropped.
>
> If you want to get work done in Arch with haskell, you should only install
> ghc and cabal-install(right now, you'll have to search the Internet for the
> old binaries, because the arch repos usually don't keep the old versions
> around).  Then you should add these packages to "IgnorePkg =" in pacman.conf
> this way things won't break every couple of months.  You can then choose to
> upgrade when you wish.
>
> I hope that someone who is involved with the haskell Arch stuff reads this.
> The current model needs to be rethought.  Linux should be sane by default,
> but I've lost many many hours learning that arch's relationship with haskell
> is not so :(  Probably the best solution would be to make Arch automatically
> keep two versions of ghc around at any given time.
>
> Thank you for your time,
> Timothy Hobbs
>
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-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
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