Re: I'd like to help out.

[trentbuck@gmail.com (Trent W. Buck)]

"Jeremy Shaw" <jeremy@n-heptane.com> writes:

>> 1) A cabal-to-deb command that will convert a Hackage download into a
>> Debian source package, figuring out build-deps from .cabal.  I think
>> there has been some work on this, but nothing we can rely upon.
>
> The cabal-debian executable from this library:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/debian
>
> Does exactly that. Why can't we rely upon it?
>
> cabal-debian works!  It has been tested on dozens of libraries from
> hackage. We have built and installed the generated packages on lenny,
> sid, hardy, and intrepid. [...]

That may be fine for a third-party repo, but when I last looked at the
results (perhaps a month ago) from the cabal-debian in hackage, ISTR
they were full of lintian errors and warnings.  For example, ISTR the
package descriptions of the -doc and -prof packages did not reproduce
the long description, they merely all had the same string along the
lines of

    This is documentation for libghc6-<package>-dev.

I also looked at the Darcs repository for cabal-debian, but I couldn't
get that to work at all.

So while I think this work is a good starting point, I strongly feel
that there is a long way to go before it could be used for official,
policy-compliant Debian packages.