
Hey, I'm writing to inform you about some action I'm planning to takeregarding our Haskell packages. Current======= The current status is this: we have in extra repo the "HaskellPlatform" package which depends on 24 haskell libraries plus ghc,cabal-install, alex and happy. Maintaining all these is relativelycumbersome (although it could be made a bit nicer by some cleverscripting) and in my opinion goes a bit against the simplicity clauseof our beloved distro. A bit worse is that our dependance on the haskell-platform means thatwe cannot upgrade ghc as soon as we could. The current platformdepends on ghc-7.0.3, and the platform's website informs helpfully:"Next release: July 2011". People have been wishing for ghc-7.2.1(released on 9 August 2011) for quite some time. Future====== The actions I'm about to do are following: - remove haskell-platform and all its libs from extra - only keep ghc in extra - alex, happy and cabal-install and the libs they need (5-10) go to community Since a ghc upgrade usually calls for a rebuild of every library thathas been built on it, this and any future ghc rebuild will have aminimum of 2 week bug-free staging period to allow all packagemaintainers at least some time to rebuild everything that's needed. Haskell binary repo=================== I've heard that there's a separate package repo for many haskellpackages. That seems like a good idea, especially if it's easy tolaunch a rebuild of everything, and if it works well enough. I'd liketo hear about that, if anyone maintaining it happens to be listening. AUR=== My humble opinion is that we do not need to support any of thehaskell- packages in AUR in any significant way, as cabal-install doesa far better job there than our silly wrapper around it. If people wantto maintain them, fine. --vk