news and updates

[Jens Petersen]

Hi,

It's been quiet here again.
I thought I would share a few bits of news and updates.

1) F21 Mass Rebuild

Mass Rebuild happened and apart from a hiccup with network
which got bumped "accidentally" just before the mass rebuild
causing a lot of build failures there were no big surprises.
If you maintain packages and haven't already then please
check through http://ausil.fedorapeople.org/f21-need-rebuild.html.
For network library failures you should be able to run
"fedpkg build" now and they should just build.

I will try to avoid parking version updates in pkg git
in the future - ghc-7.8 preparations have been taking
a lot longer than I expected.

2) ghc-7.8

Progress has been a little slow on ghc-7.8 for F21,
but assuming 7.8.3 comes out soon I think we can still
make it before Alpha/Feature Freeze at the beginning
of July.  I have written a new build tool(s) [1],
finally porting my shell scripts to Haskell for
more consistent building and maintainability.
(They still need to be parallelized though for
more speed up.) Unless the Feature Freeze moves
a lot after 2014-07-08 haskell-platform may
be get released in time but we already have
a good idea of the versions it is expected to ship.

3) Packaging changes for ghc-7.8

With ghc-7.8 we have shared libs and dynamic linking
finally on all Linux archs!  And I think ghc/ghci
support shared only libraries too.  (Note also that
ghc-7.8 builds static and dyn object files simultaneously
to save build time.)  So I am considering whether
to subpackage static libs and static devel files
to save bandwidth and diskspace.  Any opinions?
At the same time we could also consider bringing back
doc subpackages perhaps.  One way to keep backward
compatibility would be to make -devel a meta package
pulling in -static and -doc (we could even have -prof
too but I would like to keep the number of subpackages
vaguely sane;).  I will do some experiments to see
how well it might work and report back.

Also I have been thinking to drop the generated
filelists from the packaging and just list %files lists
explicitly.  Though since time is short now
we might delay this until F22.

4) Package updating for F21

We also have a lot of package updating still to
do for F21/ghc-7.8. If you can help with updating
your packages in git that would be welcome
but please test version changes first with cblrepo
using the cblrepo data in haskell-sig.git. [2]
I have added some cblrepo output to some of the URM
bugs last month and planning to update the bugs
and help with more updating soon.

5) I pushed a docker image of Fedora Haskell
https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/juhp/fedora-haskell-ghc/
Please give it a try and let me know if you have any feedback.
The name is a little long so I might rename it again in the future.
At the moment it contains ghc, cabal-install,
most of haskell-platform, and some of the most used libraries.
I don't remember exactly but I think it is about a ~300MB download
once you have the "official" fedora:20 image it is built on top of.

6) Secondary archs

Also ghc got bootstrapped recently for ppc64le and aarch64 (arm64). :-)
So they should be available for F21 too.

Thanks, Jens

 
[1] https://github.com/fedora-haskell/fedora-haskell-tools
[2] https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/haskell-sig.git/tree/cblrepo/f21