Re: [arch-haskell] installing multiple versions of the same package

Nicolas Pouillard wrote:

On Tue, 9 Nov 2010 09:59:54 +0100, Rémy Oudompheng wrote:

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On 2010/11/8 Magnus Therning wrote:

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On 08/11/10 19:51, Xyne wrote:

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Magnus Therning wrote:

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I suggest adding them to a group named "haskell-platform" too.

With or without having a haskell-platform package?

Packages and groups should never have the same name. If you think a package by that name would make more sense then forget I mentioned using a group.

I personally think a (meta-) package is better than a group.  I've never really understood groups.  That is, I understand perfectly how they work, but I don't understand the reason for having them.

I see groups as a user-friendly manner of presenting, sorting, installing packages, while meta-packages are friendlier to developers and package managers (you can use a meta-package as dependency). I don't think we are going to have depends=(haskell-platform) anywhere, since all PKGBUILDs we have rely on the individual libraries.

If there is so little difference, then I'm for the meta-package solution.

If I ever get around to implementing true optdeps [1] myself, them metapackages will be truly useful. Until then, they leave the user with no real configuration other than patching the package every time it's upgraded.. [1] http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2010-October/011695.html (It's one of my many explanations of how a relatively simple change could fundamentally improve the situation and reduce overall complexity.)