Changes to GHC that will expose new packages

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Donnerstag, den 22.03.2012, 21:52 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:
> On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 10:47:45AM -0700, David Terei wrote:
> > We are currently contemplating some changes to GHC that will
> > unfortunately mean we'll need to include these packages: haskeline,
> > mtl, terminfo & utf8-string. We wanted to check what the
> > implications for the haskell platform were and if you had any
> > advice.
> > 
> > The reason for this is that we want to expose an API for ghci. ghci
> > relies on haskeline and through that mtl, terminfo & utf8-string.
> > Previously ghci was just built as a binary with no library
> > component, so its dependencies didn't matter.
> 
> AFAIU this would also impact all people packaging haskell, whether
> they use HP or not.  Including these packages in GHC will most likely
> mean that improvements to these packages only become available to end
> users when new versions of GHC arrive.  I'm not sure how quickly these
> packages move, but I think that would be an unfortunate situation
> indeed.

yes, this is what I am thinking as well. Also Debian has so far the
policy not packaging GHC provided libraries separately again, so the
existing packages have to be removed and all packages depending on them
have to be modified – this has happened with binary for 7.4.

So with my distribution maintainer hat on, I’m not happy about the
proposed changes, but I’m also not sure what alternative I can propose.
Having GHCi as a component separately from GHC, as Magnus suggests,
might be an interesting option.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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