
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)