Re: [Haskell-cafe] Hackage on Linux

Hi, Am Dienstag, den 24.08.2010, 09:30 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 06:50, Mathew de Detrich wrote:

...

- in some situations doing a general update with arch (through clyde or packer) breaks ghc (last time it happened packer tried to uninstall/update arch packages which failed because those packages had dependencies. The files got removed but since unregister failed ghc thought they still existed)

This is arguably an error in the Arch packages. The dependencies aren't quite as strict as they really should be. I've taken the approach of never letting pacman update any haskell-* package. Instead I do a small song-and-dance where I first remove the packages in question, and any package that depends on them, then I re-install what I just removed.

In Debian, this cannot happen any more, as libraries are tied to the packages of their dependencies via the ABI hash used by ghc. (If I am correctly understanding the symptoms). So using apt-get upgrade will never break any Debian-installed packages. It can however happen that your per-user cabal-install’ed packages break, but this can be easily fixed by using cabal install again. OTOH, you cannot expect Debian to always and immediately install the latest Cabal versions – there are possibly good reasons for not upgrading. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata