ghc-7.8 now in Fedora Rawhide

[Jens Petersen]

The Fedora Haskell SIG is pleased to announce the arrival of GHC 7.8 in Fedora 22 Rawhide (development tree).

- the GHC version is 7.8.4: we are no longer following haskell-platform strictly
- Around 125 Haskell packages have been updated to new versions, including pandoc-1.13.2.

See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/GHC_7.8.

GHC 7.8 has a lot of nice new features including:
- shared dynamic libraries on *nix arches
- a new runtime I/O manager which scales much better for larger workloads
- new NCG and overhauled llvm backend

See https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/7.8.4/docs/html/users_guide/release-7-8-1.html

At the same there are currently still a number of provisos in Rawhide:
- a few packages have not yet been rebuilt/updated with ghc-7.8.4:
  - build errors:  bustle, ghc-ForSyde, ghc-type-level, ghc-parameterized-data
  - missing new deps:  hledger, Agda, leksah, cab
- also the RTS seems to have some strange problems on ARM leading to crashes which is under investagation: no idris build on armv7.

These should be fixed over the coming days/weeks.

Please report any problems you find in bugzilla.

Thanks, Jens

[Jens-Ulrik Petersen]

[this follow mail is a bit - I started writing it during devconf.cz...]
> The Fedora Haskell SIG is pleased to announce the arrival of GHC 7.8 in
> Fedora 22 Rawhide (development tree).
> At the same there are currently still a number of provisos in Rawhide:
> a few packages have not yet been rebuilt/updated with ghc-7.8.4:
> build errors:  bustle, ghc-ForSyde, ghc-type-level, ghc-parameterized-data

Bustle is now built - thanks to the author.

I am probably going to retire the ForSyDe stack (ie also type-level and parameterized-data)
since it seems no longer maintained upstream.

Bruno Wolf is working on hedgewars, which I had forgotten to list.
> missing new deps:  hledger, Agda, leksah, cab

hledger needs: tabular, wizards -> control-monad-free -> prelude-extras
(as noted in the URM bug for a while now https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=839234)
Ben: do you have time for this?

Agda needs: equivalence, data-hash, boxes, STMonadTrans, and tf-random -> QuickCheck >= 2.7.5
I will try to submit packages after assessing QuickCheck-2.7.

leksah needs: regex-tdfa-text, vado, vcsgui, vcswrapper
I am wondering if it might be better to move leksah to Copr?
That would also get us quicker to gtk3 support ;o)
and I don't think it does anything dyre-ish
so I can quickly use cabal install there...

cab needs: conduit >=1.1, conduit-extra >=1.1.2
(I'd like to update conduit from 1.0 anyway.)

But we could also move some of these to Copr if they take too long...
> also the RTS seems to have some strange problems on ARM leading to crashes
>
> which is under investagation: no idris build on armv7.

I had to disable various %check section on arm because of this.
Reported upstream at https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/10029

Many things seem to work though including pandoc and ghci
and idris the only excluded package I think.

On another note I didn't get ghc-7.8 to build yet on arm64...

Do follow up with comments or thoughts.

Jens