On Mon, Sep 15, 2003 at 01:24:40PM +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote:
No. Debian only allows build-depends on a per-source package basis, so this would mean that the library would be restricted to platforms on which all haskell compilers exist.
ghc6 build-depends on gcc-2.95 [sparc] meaning gcc-2.95 is needed on sparc only.
Ah, I didn't realize you could do that... but this would mean every library package would have encoded into it which compilers are avaliable on which platforms, which seems like a waste. I guess a better way to do this would be to have a package "all-haskell-compilers" which on each platform depends on all available haskell compilers, and then library packages could just depend on that.
The problem as I see it is that either you have to make the build-deps stricter than they need to be to force things to build with the latest compiler version or you need to wait for the buildds to build the new compiler on all arches before uploading the libraries. This wouldn't be so bad if the chances of all the buildds actually working at any given time was better, although a binary upload could be done by hand for the one or two broken ones.
Another problem (and this is *very* debian-specific) would be that *every* haskell library and compiler would have to simultaneously move from unstable into testing, along with all libraries that have haskell bindings.
The first option means that someone who has an older compiler (backporting to stable, don't want to upgrade to the latest version for some reason, or whatever) can't tell the difference between a library trying to build with this version and one which won't build with earlier versions.
I would assume that using option one the depends would be used to indicate what kind of compiler it works with (besides being used to indicate what -dev packages are required). -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org