proposal: static subpackages for executable binaries

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

Hi,

A while back I asked here about what people thought about
doing static linking of executables against Haskell libraries,
and the replies I got were basically against that.

I have been getting more requests for statically linked Bin packages
from various users so now I am thinking to add static *subpackages* for
packages with Haskell binary executable packages.

eg cabal-install-static, pandoc-static, darcs-static, hscolour-static, etc

The main base packages will still carry the default dynlinked
executable.  I will use alternatives to handle the choice
between the dyn and statically linked Haskell binaries.
(All executables will still be dynlinked against C libs
of course.)

This flexibility should make more users happy
and will make for greater portability of binaries.
eg Maybe someone wants to use latest pandoc or
cabal-install on an older release, then they
can install the static subpackage there by hand.

I think it makes most sense to start doing this
for F22 Rawhide once we move to ghc-7.8.

I have done a PoC locally for alex (since it is a smaller package)
and it seems to work so far.  So assuming it looks good
I will probably go ahead and implement this into
ghc-rpm-macros for F22 and then later cabal-rpm.

Jens

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

Hi,
> I have been getting more requests for statically linked Bin packages
> from various users so now I am thinking to add static *subpackages* for
> packages with Haskell binary executable packages.
>
> eg cabal-install-static, pandoc-static, darcs-static, hscolour-static, etc
>
> The main base packages will still carry the default dynlinked
> executable.  I will use alternatives to handle the choice
> between the dyn and statically linked Haskell binaries.
> (All executables will still be dynlinked against C libs
> of course.)

I have played a bit with this now and ran into the "usual" problem
that rpm %ghost does not seem to play well with changing files into symlinks
or at any rate converting a file into an alternative symlink.

Actually I remember the same issue when Fedora emacs moved
to alternatives (perhaps it is a weakness of Fedora's version of alternatives?).
The workaround seems to be to uninstall and reinstall but that is
not really good/acceptable IMHO.

You can see my implementation for alex at:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/alex.git/tree/alex.spec?id=7014db360f7e9b...

I tried switching it to %posttrans (like emacs) but that didn't help...

Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions?

I would really like to get this done but there doesn't
seem to be a clean foolproof way to implement it, AFAICS. :-|

Right now the only idea I have would be to add a symlink to alex.static
in %post if /usr/bin/alex does not exist, but that is kind of fragile;
or %pre rm /usr/bin/alex??

Jens

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/alex.git/tree/alex.spec?id=7014db360f7e9b...
> or %pre rm /usr/bin/alex??

Actually this seems to work (obviously with some conditionals).
So maybe that is the way to go.

I may ask devel list or FPC if this has any known problems.

Jens