On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 12:31:23PM +0000, Joachim Breitner wrote:
One potential problem is that some Linux distributions really don't like it if you bundle modified versions of external libraries. However, I just don't see a way around this: [...] [...] I guess this means me... Indeed Debian has the policy to avoid modified bundled libraries, if somehow possible. For example, we patch the build system to use the system-provided libffi.
This policy isn't even specific to linux distributions ;-) I don't know about the package building infrastructure for debian or fedora, but for openbsd (where i'm doing a lot of haskell stuff), it would be enough if the ghc sources would include not only a (patched or unpatched) gmp source tree but also the ghc-specific patches to gmp. The rationale behind this polcicy (for openbsd, i can't speak for debian): if there are 42 packages where the source distribution files contain their own (probably patched) version of gmp, and suddenly a critical patch has to be applied to gmp, we would have to apply it 43 times (for gmp itself and for all the 42 packages using a bundled gmp). If the source distribution files contained diffs for gmp, we could (at least try to) extract our patched gmp and apply the diff on top of it. => less work, any openbsd-specific patch automatically will be applied to all 42 packages. Ciao, Kili