Shae Matijs Erisson Wrote:
In short, I'd like to see some libraries packaged for Debian. I'm especially interested in seeing the various Gui libs arrive. My question though, is how to package a lib in such a way that it works for all three of the packaged Haskell compilers?
There are related discussions on various lists. On Haskell-cafe, we talked about packaging Debian stuff: http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2002-December/003708.html Also on Haskell-cafe, there was a small discussion on the state of libraries and the lack of a central repository for libraries: http://haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2002-October/003516.html On Glasgow-haskell-users, there was a discussion about how to create a system for authors of 3rd party libraries independently of a particular compiler: http://haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2002-November/004322.html
From Simon Marlow's comments:
Suppose we had an infrastructure which someone could plug their library source code into, and immediately get
- a source tarball which will configure/build/install on a Unix/cygwin system with GHC installed, and provide a GHC package when installed.
- skeleton binary packages for RPM, Windows installer, *BSD ports, Gentoo ebuild, etc. The binary packages will require some programmer intervention (such as setting the dependencies correctly), but much of the work can be done automatically.
Though I haven't used it extensively yet, hmake seems like a good system to start with since it has nice flags like "-nhc" and "-ghc", it can be configured to use either, it has sane defaults, etc. FPTools does have a nice makefile system that 3rd party developers could adopt, though at the moment it sort of relies on those libraries being inside a ghc source directory, and I don't know how well it would work w/ nhc or Hugs. Several people have commented that the problems with Haskell libraries and compilers are similar to the problems with elisp. Maybe a solution would be to augment hmake with an idea of registering packages and {re}compiling them when new / different compilers are installed. I'm starting to like this idea a lot better than trying to make the packages depend on the particular compilers and versions. I notice that the Haskell packages sometimes get out of date, and it would be hard to get all the maintainers coordinated enough to release packages at the same time a new compiler comes out. More thoughts? peace, isaac