Sébastien Willmann wrote:
Is there an issue specific to Haskell that makes it harder than with other languages?
Well yes, the fact that I can't take a dynamic executable from F19 and run it in F20 or vice-versa, etc.
I just "bumped" into this again when trying to get cabal-rpm under ghc-7.8.
I guess one could argue that tools like cabal-install and cblrpm need/should not be tied to a specific ghc version: at least in this sense statically linking them for more portability makes some sense. Arguably cabal-install would be enough but in practice some executables have a lot of deps making that impractical.
Overall I agree we should continue to do dynamic linking generally, but also consider linking static Haskell libs for greater portability across releases/ghc versions perhaps where it makes particular sense.
Though this would really be a workaround for the lack of parallel installation of Fedora Haskell shared libraries per ghc version (Software Collections could be used for this) or actually ghc's hyperstrict library versioning. Another approach which seems good for dynamic might be "bundle" cabal-install into the ghc package though upstream might well be relunctant to do it.
Jens