pandoc, git-annex, and xmonad are available in [haskell-core]; no need to compile anything yourself or pull down extra dependencies.

As far as providing only build of binary command-line programs (and not libs) and building needed libs for each tool in a sandbox build; that's been discussed over on the mac side w/ brew.

I for one *really* appreciate having binary installs of haskell libs available. Some take *forever* to compile (e.g. llvm-general), and I really like having one consistent set of libs to worry about and not having to figure out library version number juggling myself. I use a lot of haskell tools, and I also compile haskell programs / do development in haskell. If a lib's already been compiled into a package, it's making that available for other computers to install, rather than make other boxes recompile that themselves.

For things not in [haskell-core], I've been using cabal2arch to make PKGBUILDs, put those on AUR, and install those myself. I don't have anything cabal-install'd at the user level.

On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 2:22 PM, Jeff Johnson <jefdaj@gmail.com> wrote:

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:

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.arch-linux/1743
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haskell_package_guidelines

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

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