Re: haskell ghc demodularization?

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 12:58 PM Fraser Tweedale <ftweedal(a)redhat.com&gt; wrote:

>  I'm in favour of the idea.  My only question: will there be a
>  "default" release that provides the "bare" executables `ghc`,
>  `cabal`, ...? 

Right, good point, Fraser - I forgot to touch on this.

Ya basically the core "mainline" package experience should be unalterated:
people can continue just to install the plain ghc, cabal-install, and other
Fedora Haskell packages
just like now - the only difference would be you will additionally be able
to install say ghc9.2-9.2.1
(/usr/bin/ghc-9.2.1) and maybe cabal-install3.6
(/usr/bin/cabal-install-3.6) (which would be built with ghc9.2).

The earlier implementation used alternatives to allow setting the default
ghc version.
But I am thinking perhaps we would not do that this time round at the
system level.

I think it makes sense to put this forward as a F36 Change proposal.

Jens

ps Also part of the reasoning is that modules are more complicated to
maintain:
eg they sometimes disappear after branching or rebuild failures and SLA EOL
etc.
And they are kind of all or nothing - a simple bumps forces rebuilding for
all releases etc.
Having versions as normal packages will make maintenance more manageable.
The complexity seems too great for building heavy stacks like Haskell.