On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 20:40:01 +0000, Alex Young wrote:
On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 12:33:21 +0000, Vladimir Zlatanov wrote:
Yes, those are good points. Maybe adding functionality similar to plt's planet http://planet.plt-scheme.org and http://download.plt-scheme.org/doc/371/html/mzscheme/mzscheme-Z-H-5.html#nod...
In plt scheme including a module, not present in the local repository , but included via planet, resolves the module, including version, etc..., downloads it from planet, and uses it appropriately. It makes following various dependencies extremely easy. Updating with a new version is updating the appropriate local module definitions.
I have no clue how it would be best to implement this for haskell, but it is a very user friendly no hassle way to work, so I reckon worth investigating.
Many other programming languages have packaging strategies that sound very similar. Several of them have managed to have a negative impact on platforms that already have good packaging technologies (i.e. almost every platform apart from Windows ;-). I'd hate to see Haskell go in a direction where packaging for e.g. Debian is made more difficult than it is at the moment.
See [1] for the Debian Ruby packagers' opinion of RubyGems. IIRC similar concerns have been raised for Python's eggs.
/M
[1]: http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/rubygems.html Much of that's either outdated or just plain wrong, as I understand it. In the interest of balance, note the following thread on ruby-talk, which devolved fairly rapidly into a bunfight over Debian's
Magnus Therning wrote: policies (and a comparison with Apple's approach to the same problem):
http://www.nabble.com/-ANN--RubyGems-0.9.5-tf4840470.html
There are arguments on both sides, but the utility of having RubyGems available far outweighs the minor inconvenience of having to install RubyGems outside apt.
All I was trying to say is that if discussions like the one you link to can be avoided altogether then that would be good. I have never been heavy into Ruby programming, but I thought that the location for gems was the least of the problems they list. The major one, IFAIU is: “Rubygems is source-intrusive. The require instruction is replaced by a require_gem instruction to allow for versioned dependencies. Debian and most other systems think that dealing with versioned dependencies outside of the source is a better idea.” And it's not only a problem for Ruby in Debian: http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20070904.152810.4f84c924.en.html “There are currently no plans to improve RubyGems to ease the work of Debian and RPM packagers.” I think that making it easy to package Haskell libraries, and programs, for any OS/distribution (Debian, Gentoo, PC-BSD, windows, etc) is /extremely/ important. I for one would like to see programs written in Haskell make it into as many places as possible. I'd hate to see a Haskell-specific packaging system prevent that in a similar way that RubyGems does. From the Debian Ruby team again: “[Users can] continue to install their apps the way they are used to (using apt-get), since most of them do not care about the language their apps are written in or about other ways this application/library is made available.” /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus．therning＠gmail．com http://therning.org/magnus