On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 12:58 PM Fraser Tweedale <ftweedal@redhat.com> 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.