On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 10:47 AM, John Goerzen
<jgoerzen@complete.org> wrote:
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
We do that in cabal-debian. I sincerely doubt that it is bug free, but it does a reasonable job.
2) Identifying the non-Haskell build-deps for packages that are things
like C bindings
I forget if we handle this one.
3) Correctly pulling out license and copyright information
I think we did the obvious thing, but often it doesn't work, that is Cabal files often don't have the correct specification.
4) Being able to rebuild binaries on a mass scale when the packages they
depend upon are rebuilt, or when GHC itself is rebuilt
Yes, our autobuilder does that.
5) Identifying which packages can have Hugs packages built
Some work on this, but we don't use them.
6) Preserving all of the above knowledge across upgrades
We do that with the cdbs and quilt style diffs for packages.
7) Automatically identifying what is out-of-date vs. Hackage
We do not do this yet.
8) Figuring out whether new Hackage uploads should be uploaded to
Debian. Example: the latest HaXml on Hackage is not a stable release.
Definitely do not do this.