Personally, I like the latest version of GHC being in the repository, as
that's the version I normally use.
What packages aren't working for you on 7.6? I find that they get updated
pretty quickly, and if you run into any that aren't, feel free to send the
authors a pull request. Almost everything is on github.
- Clark
On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 4:49 PM,
Hello, Who is in charge of the ghc and haskell packages on Arch linux? The current system isn't working.
Arch linux tends to update packages very quickly.
For ghc, always having the latest ghc isn't a good thing. At least if you actually want to get some work done. A majority of the time the latest GHC is unusable. This is because the packages in hackage simply don't keep up. With the current ghc version(7.6.1) even some basic packages in hackage are not upgraded yet.
Right now, a large number of other haskell related packages are in the arch repos. Other than gtk2hs, I think these packages are pointless duplications. In the other cases, it has been my experience that it is simpler to maintain these packages through cabal rather than through pacman. Support for these packages in Arch should probably be dropped.
If you want to get work done in Arch with haskell, you should only install ghc and cabal-install(right now, you'll have to search the Internet for the old binaries, because the arch repos usually don't keep the old versions around). Then you should add these packages to "IgnorePkg =" in pacman.conf this way things won't break every couple of months. You can then choose to upgrade when you wish.
I hope that someone who is involved with the haskell Arch stuff reads this. The current model needs to be rethought. Linux should be sane by default, but I've lost many many hours learning that arch's relationship with haskell is not so :( Probably the best solution would be to make Arch automatically keep two versions of ghc around at any given time.
Thank you for your time, Timothy Hobbs
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