G'day all. On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 08:47:15AM +0100, Sven Panne wrote:
In a nutshell: It doesn't work, even if only the patchlevel of GHC changes and the user-visible ABI stays the same. As has been discussed several times, this is the price one has to pay for the heavy inter-module optimizations GHC does. And recompilation is not always an option, either, e.g. when the package in question has some native parts which rely on development stuff (headers, program generators, etc.) which is normally not installed on the target.
Requiring the headers/program generators/whatever isn't a big deal, IMO. Either you could make the packages depend on the appropriate development packages, or you could package dependencies separately. As for the inter-module optimisation problem, as other have noted, this would not be an issue for stable packages, since the environment that they depend on is stable. I have a suspicion that some compiler help may go some way to solving the problem in the long-run (e.g. if GHC told us what it actually used rather than what it theoretically depends on), but I don't want to go there yet. Or probably ever. Cheers, Andrew Bromage