Re: Packaging team

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

Iain Lane <laney@ubuntu.com> writes:

> On Tue, 2009-05-26 at 22:35 +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
>> ...  A team was proposed previously (I have made good experiences
>> with the Debian Perl Group which I once started and then left when
>> others did the work :-)), but general resonance was not great. I’m
>> still in favor of such a team. Or maybe a haskell-packaging-wide NMU
>> acceptance agreement for uploads that make the package installable
>> and policy compliant again.
>
> I've not contributed to debian-haskell before, but I would be more
> inclined to do so were such a team structure in place. I'm an Ubuntu
> developer and often take care of the Haskell stack over there. This
> means that I sometimes come across bugs (filed two yesterday, which I
> could have just fixed directly) or wish to upgrade to a new upstream -
> work which I am willing to do in Debian, but currently cannot.

+1.

I maintain Darcs in Debian, and I also do upstream development of Darcs.

As a developer, I've been repeatedly frustrated by an inability to
install all of Darcs' growing list of build dependencies on a Sid
system, and trying to supplement apt-gotten libraries by installing the
remainder from Cabal is an abysmal failure, because it's practically
impossible to "pin" Cabal dependencies like parsec and old-time to the
versions used by the apt-gotten libraries.  I can understand why so many
Haskell developers seem to have given up on Debian in favour of Arch!

I get the impression that my inability to install e.g. libghc6-zlib-dev
right now could be fixed with by bumping the version numbers in
debian/control and re-uploading, and that the ONLY reason this takes so
long is because packages are the responsibility of individual
maintainers.  A particular maintainer is unavailable for a week, but I'm
not!  If all it takes is a bump and an upload, I can do that right now!

If I've misunderstood the problem, I apologize.  But from where I'm
sitting, communal maintenance of Haskell library packages seems not only
advisable, but ESSENTIAL.