Re: NMUs?

[Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+hs@mega-nerd.com>]

John Goerzen wrote:

> It appears that some of the Haskell packages in sid have been updated,
> which is great.  However, there are some that haven't:
> libghc6-network-dev, libghc6-parsec-dev among them, which are preventing
> several of my packages from being able to be updated.
> 
> What's the scoop with these to, and Kari do you plan to upload them soon
> or can I make an NMU?

I have a single haskell package (haskell-curl) which I intend to do
myself RealSoonNow (tm), but I'm thinking that the current situation
where a new ghc requires the building of every package that build 
depends on ghc but where this rebuild is not triggered automatically
is somewhat sub-optimal.

As an Ocaml user as  well, I notice that the debian-ocaml-maintainers
group seems to have similar compiler driven rebuild requirements,  but
they do seem to have some automation. I think most Ocaml related 
packages resolve this issue by making the package group maintained
with one or more uploaders who do the actual maintenance. For instance,
for libsyslog-ocaml the debian control file says:

    Maintainer: Debian OCaml Maintainers <debian-ocaml-maint@lists.debian.xxx>
    Uploaders: Eric Cooper <ecc@cmu.xxx>, Ralf Treinen <treinen@debian.xxx>

As a user this means that within about a week of a new compiler being
uploaded, all of the group maintained packages have been churned through
the build system.

The result is that Ocaml on Debian (and even Ubuntu) is an absolute
pleasure to use and that even in sid, the compiler and the libraries
are very rarely out-of-sync.

On the haskell side of the fence, there are still numerous packages 
which are still 6.8.2 only, even though the 6.10.1 compiler hit
unstable months ago and the new compiler 6.10.3 has been around for
at least a week.

Does anyone else think we should try implementing a system similar to
what the debian-ocaml-maintainers have?

Cheers,
Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/