On Thursday 20 September 2007 16:33, David Menendez wrote:
Does RPM, etc., deal with the fact that Haskell library installations are specific to a particular platform?
It depends what you mean with "deal": If it is only making sure that a given binary library RPM matches the installed Haskell system, yes.
If I install GHC and some library, and later install Hugs or a later GHC, how easy is it to make sure the library is available to the new installations?
This is asking for much more, and the general answer for all mature packaging systems I know is: This will never be the case for *binary* packages. The simple reason is that for rebuilding packages (this is basically what you are asking for), you have different (and typically *many*) more dependencies. This is why e.g. RPM differentiates between "Requires" (i.e. normal runtime dependecies) and "Build-Requires" (dependencies for building an RPM). Although this situation is far from perfect, it is a direct consequence of the fact that there is no such thing as a "standard Haskell ABI" which is shared between all implementations and versions of them. The situation in C is much better (because it is much easier there), but even C++ suffered from ABI problems for several years on most platforms. Cheers, S.