Alessandro Pezzoni wrote:
You could/should create it with the cblrepo database in habs. This way you would manage the other dependencies, too.
That approach is probably optimal, but not everyone will use cblrepo. As it's easy to add, it is better to include the necessary information for "traditional" Pacman packaging. That way everyone is happy. The Haskell guidelines can always be updated to strongly recommend using cblrepo (if they don't already).
Maybe I have to make clear that I'm not arguing against one approach or the other, as they seem almost equivalent to me. The only actual benefit I see from the current approach, as previously I found a bit cumbersome to find out which versions of which packages were provided by the ghc package (only way I found was looking directly in the ABS PKGBUILD, but maybe there is a simpler one).
You can just check "pacman -Si ghc" or "pacman -Qi ghc" to see what is provided. You could also use e.g. pyalpm to write a very simple script to do it as well, or even write a Bash script to parse the pacman database files. I don't mean that those approaches would be better. I only mention them as alternatives to checking ABS. Anyway, Magnus has agreed to re-insert the provides array, so this is once again just a matter of user choice, which should make everyone happy. ;)