Debian haskell packaging: We're way behind
I'm noticing on the haskell-cafe list that Arch Linux has 827 Haskell
packages.
I'm CCing Don Stewart because he's the one that listed that figure, and
has also been passively goading me to do something about the situation
in Debian ;-)
What are the major challenges towards being able to automatically
convert Hackage/Cabal packages into Debian source packages? I'd imagine
they are:
1) Identifying the Debian package names/versions for the Cabal build-deps
2) Identifying the non-Haskell build-deps for packages that are things
like C bindings
3) Correctly pulling out license and copyright information
4) Being able to rebuild binaries on a mass scale when the packages they
depend upon are rebuilt, or when GHC itself is rebuilt
5) Identifying which packages can have Hugs packages built
6) Preserving all of the above knowledge across upgrades
7) Automatically identifying what is out-of-date vs. Hackage
8) Figuring out whether new Hackage uploads should be uploaded to
Debian. Example: the latest HaXml on Hackage is not a stable release.
Don, I'm curious, how much of the above are you Arch Linux folks doing?
Is there something I'm missing? How are you solving these problems?
I have identified 96 libghc6-*-dev packages in our archive, and 41
libhugs-* packages. There are roughly twice that number of binary
packages when -prof and -doc packages are considered.
-- John
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