Magnus Therning wrote:
This episode has made me consider whether the tight dependency between [haskell] and [extra]/[community] should be broken in the future.
/M
I think I argued for breaking this dependency completely during the discussions after Don stepped down. If you bring all of the Haskell packages currently spread across [extra] and [community] into [haskell] (including ghc), then you eliminate all of synchronization issues. You will have full control over topological rebuilds and you can ensure the the included packages form a compatible subset. Users can place [haskell] above [extra] in pacman.conf, which would avoid issues if ghc and some other packages remain in the official repos*. That should not be an issue though because I think there is a good chance that [haskell] could obtain official status. I don't remember exactly where I saw it, but just two days ago I found a wiki page or a mailing list post where the devs had stated that they would like to see more repos dedicated to specific goals. The [haskell] repo definitely qualifies. Another advantage of keeping everything in one repo is that it you could then have non-conflicting repos with different versions of GHC and different subsets of packages. I am not suggesting that you maintain such repos. I am only pointing out that it would make it easier to do so. I truly believe that this would improve the Haskell experience on Arch. /X * This should work even if [haskell] depends on some (non-Haskell) packages in [extra]. Pacman searches the repos in order, but it will still descend past [haskell] in the list to satisfy dependencies of packages in [haskell]. The order simply ensures that it will find ghc etc in [haskell] instead of [extra].