December 2008 - arch-haskell

Near past, present & future
by Vesa Kaihlavirta 22 Feb '09

22 Feb '09

Hi guys, As some of you may have noticed (perhaps with some pain), ghc-6.10.1 has been in testing for over a week now. Some performance regressions have been noticed, and some packages fail to build on it (most due to trivial problems). That's why it won't be coming to extra too soon. Nevertheless, I'm using it as my main platform for development, and it works well. Presently, the next big thing will be the Haskell Platform, which is basically a bundle of important packages. We will try to get the packages in it to extra, with a "haskell-platform" group defined. So pacman -S haskell-platform should get you all the goodies now and forever. All this is good. Now for a bit of controversy. I'm not very happy about how AUR works for us. We get good PKGBUILDs and rather painless installation through yaourt, but it feels quite clumsy to me. For at least the following reasons: 1) When we update ghc, there's no good way to update all the packages in AUR that depend on it. Best way to cleanup is pacman -Rc cabal-install, which kinda works but... And if I go back to the other ghc version (like I often did when playing with 6.8.2 and 6.10.1), my old packages are lost. 2) Pacman just doesn't support the sort of versioning we'd need for this. By principle. 3) yaourt often builds dependencies twice. Perhaps just a simple bug in yaourt. There's a simple solution to all these problems: for packages outside the Haskell Platform, we start using cabal-install. This has worked for me very well, and I'm not sure if I see why we should have Arch packages for everything. Of course also we would have some higher profile stuff in extra (like darcs) and community (like xmonad). Any feelings? Rest assured, I'm not gonna go at this blindly. --vk (dons an asbestos suit)

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any updates on 6.10?
by brad clawsie 25 Dec '08

25 Dec '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 any eta? is there anything list members can do to help to get 6.10 packaged? thanks brad -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAklN3A8ACgkQxRg3RkRK91OTqQCcD0/djO2Vj3aYAch5f871mbRu o/EAoJaQ0UBgwBsUXFlOmFDbPFGj615Q =jCEf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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AUR updated
by Don Stewart 23 Dec '08

23 Dec '08

I finally updated the package list. We now have 791 native packages building (from the 940 on hackage.haskell.org) http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?O=0&L=0&C=0&K=arch-haskell&SeB=m&SB=n… Enjoy!

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fwd: Linker Scripts on Arch & GHC
by Don Stewart 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

----- Forwarded message from arch-haskell-owner(a)haskell.org ----- Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:41:20 -0500 From: arch-haskell-owner(a)haskell.org To: arch-haskell-owner(a)haskell.org Subject: arch-haskell post from aleks.dimitrov(a)googlemail.com requires approval As list administrator, your authorization is requested for the following mailing list posting: List: arch-haskell(a)haskell.org From: aleks.dimitrov(a)googlemail.com Subject: Linker Scripts on Arch & GHC Reason: Post by non-member to a members-only list At your convenience, visit: http://www.haskell.org/mailman/admindb/arch-haskell to approve or deny the request. Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 13:47:34 +0100 From: Александър Л. Димитров <aleks.dimitrov(a)googlemail.com> To: arch-haskell(a)haskell.org Subject: Linker Scripts on Arch & GHC Hello fellow Arch-Haskellers Sorry for disturbing this peaceful list, but I only recently ran into what ultimately turned out to be a problem with Arch Linux' layout of system libraries and GHC's lacking support for linker scripts. My original bug report to the yi-devel mailing list is rather longish, so I'll just link you to it and then summarize the problem: http://tinyurl.com/6qrhnk http://preview.tinyurl.com/6qrhnk The problem: terminfo links against /usr/lib/libncurses.so, which on most distros is a symlink to something that makes more sense (like /lib/libncurses.so.5) On Arch, this is a linker script instead, which GHC cannot interpret. It thus fails with a linker error: Prelude> :m +System.Console.Terminfo Prelude System.Console.Terminfo> term <- setupTerm "xterm" Loading package syb ... linking ... done. Loading package base-3.0.3.0 ... linking ... done. Loading package terminfo-0.2.2.1 ... <command line>: can't load .so/.DLL for: ncurses (/usr/lib/libncurses.so: file too short) Gwern then kindly forwarded the Mail to Don (his response is in the above thread.) The problem with the proposed solution (for now) is that it involves manually erasing /usr/lib/libncurses.so and replacing it with a symlink. This solution has obvious flaws, of course. Most importantly, it doesn't really resolve the issue. There is at least one other package on AUR which is affected: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18495 Since I have no clue about linker scripts, and no clue about GHC's linking system either, I decided to forward the issue here. It's probably unlikely that Arch will move away from linker scripts (or is it?), so the solution would be implementing (some level of basic) support in GHC? Best, Aleks PS: and thanks for your current efforts, the Haskell support was the reason for me to switch from Debian to Arch :-) From: arch-haskell-request(a)haskell.org Subject: confirm 2b4ccbb8a7ce56d307288059b31df5bb6be58cc7 If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact, Mailman will discard the held message. Do this if the message is spam. If you reply to this message and include an Approved: header with the list password in it, the message will be approved for posting to the list. The Approved: header can also appear in the first line of the body of the reply. ----- End forwarded message -----

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Linker Scripts on Arch & GHC
by Александър Л. Димитров 08 Dec '08

08 Dec '08

Hello fellow Arch-Haskellers Sorry for disturbing this peaceful list, but I only recently ran into what ultimately turned out to be a problem with Arch Linux' layout of system libraries and GHC's lacking support for linker scripts. My original bug report to the yi-devel mailing list is rather longish, so I'll just link you to it and then summarize the problem: http://tinyurl.com/6qrhnk http://preview.tinyurl.com/6qrhnk The problem: terminfo links against /usr/lib/libncurses.so, which on most distros is a symlink to something that makes more sense (like /lib/libncurses.so.5) On Arch, this is a linker script instead, which GHC cannot interpret. It thus fails with a linker error: Prelude> :m +System.Console.Terminfo Prelude System.Console.Terminfo> term <- setupTerm "xterm" Loading package syb ... linking ... done. Loading package base-3.0.3.0 ... linking ... done. Loading package terminfo-0.2.2.1 ... <command line>: can't load .so/.DLL for: ncurses (/usr/lib/libncurses.so: file too short) Gwern then kindly forwarded the Mail to Don (his response is in the above thread.) The problem with the proposed solution (for now) is that it involves manually erasing /usr/lib/libncurses.so and replacing it with a symlink. This solution has obvious flaws, of course. Most importantly, it doesn't really resolve the issue. There is at least one other package on AUR which is affected: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=18495 Since I have no clue about linker scripts, and no clue about GHC's linking system either, I decided to forward the issue here. It's probably unlikely that Arch will move away from linker scripts (or is it?), so the solution would be implementing (some level of basic) support in GHC? Best, Aleks PS: and thanks for your current efforts, the Haskell support was the reason for me to switch from Debian to Arch :-)

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