Re: how to package Haskell libraries
"Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org> writes:
> It kind of depends on what "Haskell library" means. Is it more like a
> C library (potentially complex build system, dependencies, etc) or is
> it more like a Perl module?
As David Roundy sorta indicated, it could be either one. Building
Haskell stuff can be pretty complex. There are a number of
preprocessors and lots of useful libraries wrap stuff like the X11
library.
WRT fragility, I would be afraid that, when building on the end user's
machine, one out-of-date tool or library on the machine will hose a
whole set of applications (this is a problem either way). I hate to
say it, but it doesn't seem like the Haskell/Debian community will
necessarily do a good job keeping packages up-to-date.
It is true that the slowness of building on the user's machine would
probably only be incurred by the developers, and this can't be worse
than the situation we have now where we have to build everything by
hand and put it in /usr/local.
David Roundy:
> If we require a separate package for each compiler, I imagine many
> library packagers would opt for just packaging their library for
> ghc, which would be a shame as far as portability goes.
Indeed. Another problem is that all packages which work for a
particular compiler will have to be updated at the same time as the
compiler.
In either case, we're going to have to build some software support,
either a system to build & rebuild packages on the end-user's machine,
or I can immagine a system that would help a packager build different
binary packages for the various compilers, but it will still take some
coordination to get packages updated at the same time.
peace,
isaac
Reply to: