Hi Sven and Martin. Thanks for your input...
Sven Panne
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.
Do you mean, for instance, a package requires Happy to build, but Happy might not be installed? In this case, we could make the package depend on Happy. Surely this is better than tying each package to a specific compiler release.
So we're basically left with two kinds of packages, IMHO:
* Pre-compiled ones, tied to a particular compiler release
And whenever there is a new compiler release for each compiler, all the package maintainers are going to have to recompile their packages and upload them, right? I guess this is pretty OK once stuff gets into stable, but for unstable I think packages would be broken often, and for long periods. This is actually the case with c2hs right now if I'm not mistaken.
* Source packages for "real" developers, not just Haskell users
So for these source packages, do you envision a build system that
registers and rebuilds packages depending on which version of which
compiler you have?
More below...
Martin Sjögren
The whole idea with binary distribution is to compile things once and let others download and install the binary and be done with it. Compiling Haskell programs of moderate size on a not-very-recent computer takes quite some time, especially if you want to optimize too, and will mean a *very slow* installation procedure. That simply is unacceptable. Byte-compiling, like e.g. Python does is in my experience a lot faster.
I'm not married to the idea of recompiling everything for each user, but the convenience of having debian and hmake or some build system figure things out for you seems better since we mostly have lots of smaller libraries. So taking Sven's email into account, would you also prefer to see packages tied to a specific compiler release, then each package recompiled whenever there is a new release (assuming that this would be necessary, I'm not sure I'm right about that.) But this does bring up something that I admit I hadn't really thought much about: in stable, the new compiler releases won't really be a problem, but the different compilers (ghc, nhc, hugs) would still be a problem. So am I hearing that others would prefer to have packages like: hunit-ghc5.04.2, hunit-ghc4, hunit-hugs, hunit-nhc, etc? peace, isaac