Re: Feasibility of backports?

[Iustin Pop <iustin@debian.org>]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 10:15:48PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Donnerstag, den 08.12.2011, 20:51 +0100 schrieb Iustin Pop:
> > I'm asking more from the point of view of upstream, rather than Debian
> > packaging. I presume that due to the ghc6→ghc migration, doing backports
> > for a few simpler packages (not yesod or such) is still not an easy
> > task, right?
> > 
> > A good example that I'm thinking about is aeson; it has about 5-6
> > dependencies (I have no idea if these have in turn more dependencies
> > which are not in squeeze), so I think it would take some effort but
> > would be doable.
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> 
> my thought is that if we do backports, then we should backport the
> complete set of haskell packages, including ghc, so the ghc6→ghc
> migration should not be a problem; we just do it in backports as well.
> 
> So it is basically a problem of rebuilding everything, i.e. of
> manpower. 
> 
> Maybe, first someone should script something to rebuild ghc_7-* and
> haskell-* on a Debian stable machine and provide an unofficial backport.
> If that works out well and user demand is present, then we can consider
> an official backport.

[restarting old thread]

So, I'm again looking at this problem, as my work project has started
depending on newer versions of a few libraries than are available in
stable, so if we actually want to provide a backport to squeeze, we need
to solve that problem too.

I'm a bit split about the entire set as opposed to 5 libs. On one hand,
I understand the nicety about nice upgrade paths, but on the other hand
I'm not sure how big the effort is for the entire rebuild (as opposed
to, again, just ~5 libs).

Thoughts? Do you think it's feasible and "cheap" enough to do the entire
platform backport?

thanks,
iustin