Re: [Haskell-cafe] GHC maintenance on Arch

In his defense, from the perspective of a more or less newbie in the subject matter, I had quite a bit of trouble using Haskell under Arch. Not that it is so much better in other systems, I wouldn't know. I often was in the position to decide whether to use cabal-install, arch-haskell repositories or official repositories and many times the thing that worked for me was a mix of everything, which is quite sub-optimal, although more or less working for me at the moment. I'm not saying that this is because the way Arch works or the way Cabal is designed is wrong. Maybe it is because I'm not figuring it out. Some people say you should not use cabal-install as a package manager, because it is not supposed to be one. Again, other people say arch-haskell repositories are very buggy at the moment and one should install only cabal-install and ghc from the official repositories and only use cabal-install for the rest. Just telling my experience so far: I often have had to struggle between cabal dependency hell and non-working packages in the repositories. Either something is very wrong with the way things are right now or I'm doing everything wrong (which is more likely). I am still not in the condition of proposing things myself, but I don't think this is fair treatment so far to someone that is proposing a compromise solution to a problem he found. Anyway, hopefully this would be better clarified in the arch-haskell mailing list. 2012/10/29 Magnus Therning :

Hello Timothy,

Now I'm going to run the risk of upsetting you quite a bit by being completely blunt.

You come across in your mail like someone who has thought through your own situation, but fail to see the larger picture. You do know *your* Haskell needs, and you know what *you* would want from a project like ArchHaskell. Then however you completely fail to realise that these are *your needs*, not anyone else's, but still you suggest that ArchHaskelll is broken because it doesn't provide a system that solves *your* problems.

I suggest you take your insights of your situation and try to find a solution that works for you, and it sounds like you're on the way already with cabal-install. If you have suggestions on how to improve ArchHaskell *within the goals of the project* (which includes the general goals of ArchLinux) that would make ArchHaskell more usable to you, then you are more than welcome. However, if all you do is suggest that we completely change the goals of ArchHaskell because they don't align with your needs, then we thank you for your input, but ask you to not hold your breath for any changes.

/M

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:49 PM, wrote:

...

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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