Hi Gabor thanks for the reply.
....................Great! Yesterday I was not so lucky when I wanted to install gitit via cabal-install (and I needed to patch strict-concurreny-0.2.3 and SMTPClient-1.0.1 a bit to make the things work).
Is this always the best way to do it as opposed to submitting a patch that makes it freebsd compatible to the port maintainer?
My plans regarding addressing these problems are as follows:
- Introduce a new framework for hackage ports (enables faster updating).
- Introduce an automatic hackage to port converter using the new framework (enables faster porting).
When a haskell developer announces some new package and it's available on hackage, it would be great if it could be installed instantly despite being a freebsd user. Your blog post points out that cabal isn't everything but how fast would this 'faster updating' be. If we could completely remove the human from the system and have a tool that monitors hackage and creates ports as it happens then it would be fast enough. It wouldn't be tested but at least proper port management, uninstallation etc work with it until it then becomes modified to include patches. One thing I think we really cannot have is the dual of freebsd ports as-well as cabal install packages. Even if I try to install just using cabal install there will probably be a port that depends on a hs-* port, it will then try to install this but it already exists in ~/.cabal/ and this we be a big source of problems. Therefore if we want any freebsd ports of hackages then I think completly automated creation of up to date hackages is an absolute must.
- Update lang/ghc to GHC 6.12.x, if all the (sup)ported hackages build with it correctly.
I think some of the packages on hackage still don't build with ghc 6.12.1. Also some (or at least 1) of the freebsd hs-* ports don't build. I think the port hs-datetime was the one I couldn't build and this is still using 6.10.4. Also have you looked at how the other major operating systems such as redhat, ubuntu, opensuse, solaris, archlinux etc are doing this? Are they all just making do with having all there hackages out of package management?