Andrew Coppin
Browsing around Hackage, I notice that a seemingly random subset of packages are available for something called "arch linux". Presumably some sort of automatic conversion system is involved, but does anyone know why only certain packages appear?
I've noticed that both Debian and OpenSUSE have a very tiny selection of binary Haskell packages too. I'm guessing that these packages are also auto-generated, but presumably selected by hand. (I also don't recall seeing them listed on Hackage.) Anybody know about that?
In general, is there an advantage to having native packages for Haskell things? I guess it means you can have binary packages, so you don't need to build from source. And for executables, it means the native package manager can track all the dependencies and install them all for you, potentially without needing a Haskell build environment at all. Is that it, or have I missed something?
Hackage has limited support for distro maintainers to state which packages are available on the distribution. Last I checked, it required distro maintainers to keep a text file somewhere up to date. Note that not all distributions bother (in particular none of us involved with packaging Haskell packages for Gentoo can be bothered; we're slowly cutting back into only keeping packages that will actually be used rather than all and sundry), and even those that do might just list what's in the official repository (I think arch does this). Even then, Don Steward has a policy of packaging all and sundry for Arch (at least in the unofficial repository; this includes packages such as haskell-updater that are written for Gentoo). As for why using your distro package manager for Haskell packages is preferable: http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-... -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com