Hi everyone!

I've been becoming more and more dependent on Haskell programs lately. There aren't many popular ones (yet!), but those that do exist seem uncommonly good and have quickly become core parts of my workflow: pandoc, gitit, git-annex, and hoodle are the main ones so far, plus maybe xmonad.

But they also seem idiosyncratic and hard to install: builds often fail, pacman spits tons of errors even when upgrading successfully, you sometimes have to reinstall them all at once to maintain compatibility, etc. I've read these pages:

And I'm confused about the point of separate [haskell-*] repositories. Why all the overhead? The simplest thing I could imagine working would be a PKGBUILD with a "snapshot" of compatible dependency versions. Then you could do a sandboxed build from scratch each time. Somehing like:

_pkgname=hoodle

pkgname=$_pkgname-cabal

...

makedepends=('cabal-git') # sandboxes introduced in 1.18

_cabaldepends=(

  ...

  'coroutine-object-0.2.0.0'

  'hoodle-types-0.2.2'

  'xournal-types-0.5.0.2'

  'hoodle-builder-0.2.2.0'

  'hoodle-parser-0.2.2'

  'xournal-parser-0.5.0.2'

  ...

)

build() {

  ...

  cabal-git sandbox init

  cabal-git update

  cabal-git install $_cabaldepends $_pkgname-$pkgver

  ...

}

The only downside would be a lot of compilation, but that could be solved the same way it is for non-Haskell packages: popular ones get adopted into [community]. Does that sound sensible? Or am I on the way to deciding I should contribute to an existing repository? Should I just try it and see?

Oh and apologies if this has been answered; I just joined the mailing list.

Jeff