On November 28, 2012 04:45:57 Joachim Breitner wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 27.11.2012, 21:57 -0500 schrieb Tyson Whitehead:
I was so excited for a bit thinking that this would finally mean that Debian would move to a dynamic system. Every haskell binary being 10s of MBs (e.g., pandoc = 25MB executable) makes it look kind of bad.
its not like dynamic libraries make the bytes disappear – the (non-Haskell-developer) user who wants to use pandoc still has to install all these bytes, but now they just come split in a dozen of packages.
My point was more trying to get at the idea that maybe we don't need a separate copy of most of the bytes in each application.
Or gix-annex, a more and more popular Haskell application: Building it requires 94 Haskell library packages. Now imagine this to be dynamically built: Now installing git-annex will require 94 strage sounding packages that the user most likely has no idea what they are about, and chances are high that there is no other packages requiring these shared libraries, making most of the benefit of shared libraries moot.
Now, if Haskell was as popular as C and the user _would_ run several different processes at once that could share the shared library, this would be interesting. At the moment, I do not see how dynamically built Haskell programs are in the interest of our user.
I guess this is really a question of how many haskell programs are there being used out there. From the looks of popcon results, there isn't a whole lot of take up on anything at moment apart from ghc, xmond, and pandoc.
I was left with the impression that we were going to have this back in 2010 just as soon as squeeze got out the door... :)
It seems that noone cared enough about that, but any help is welcome. Two things to do: Patch haskell-devscripts to build the -dyn ways, and manually adding the additional package stance to the debian/contol files (if it is to be decided that the -dyn libraries should reside in packages of their own. If we decide to include them in the regular packages, this is not needed.)
Fair enough. If I was update my 2010 patch so it worked again at some point in the upcoming year (I don't have the time to do this at the moment), would there be a reasonable chance it would seem worthwhile to include it at this point? Please feel free to say no here if that is the case. I realize that maybe in a few years, when there are even more haskell applications, we can revisit the again, and possibly then it will make more sense. Cheers! -Tyson PS: I don't mean to be critical here. You've done a lot of work supporting haskell under Debian, and it's all volunteer. I really appreciate that.