[Fedora-haskell-list] GHC packaging collaboration

[Jens Petersen]

Hi Joachim,

Happy New Year and thanks for your mail.
Sorry for my slow reply: I was busy rebuilding
Fedora packages for haskell-platform-2011.4...

> judging from
> http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=ghc.git;a=summary
> you seem to be the maintianer of the GHC package in Fedora. And
> judging
> from http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=ghc.git;a=tree we are
> sharing a few patches. Im wondering if we can improve our
> collaboration?

Yes - probably mostly I have "stolen" your patches. :-)

> You can find our patches against the ghc package in
> http://anonscm.debian.org/darcs/pkg-haskell/ghc/patches/
> and for the experimental package (7.4.1-rc1) in
> http://anonscm.debian.org/darcs/pkg-haskell/experimental/ghc/patches/
> 
> Especially the system-libffi-patch is used by both of us, and is
> always a pain to port to new versions. We could try to generalize it so that
> it can go into upstream proper and be enabled by a configure flag.
> Anybody (you, or someone from the Debian Haskell Group) interested in this
> task?

Right - perhaps I can take a stab at it one day if noone else has time.

Yes this patch is probably the main maintenance burden currently for ghc
so it would definitely be good to upstream - perhaps it needs a switch
in configure though or Linux should just use system libffi anyway.
(Though earlier when I proposed the latter to SimonM, he was not too keen.)

> Judging from the contents of the patch
> ghc-gen_contents_index-type-level.patch you want to avoid the large
> runtime of gen_contents_index when type-level is installed. I had
> send a
> patch upstream that improves on that, maybe you can drop the patch
> when
> packaging ghc 7.4.1:
> https://github.com/ghc/haddock/commit/b50695a86358fd02b9a0ececbc107bf5274d5f95

I see thanks.  Ok I will definitely consider that.
So with that you don't see any lag with installing haddock documentation
any more, or probably debian spawns a subprocess for re-indexing anyway?

> The 7.4.1-rc1 release had build failures on almost every architecture
> besides i386/amd64. I guess some of these will affect you as well, so
> any help is appreciated:
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5733
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5735
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5732
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5734

Ok, I will try to do a testbuild of rc1 for Fedora finally soon too.

> BTW, if you are curious, you are welcome to subscribe to
> debian-haskell at lists.debian.org at
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-haskell/. Also, if you want to contact
> us, that is the right address, even if you are not subscribed.

Yes thanks.  Likewise for our Fedora haskell-devel list though
probably it is currently a bit too noisy with bugzilla mail traffic.

Actually I was wondering if it would make sense for us to
setup a Haskell distro mailing-list for people involved/interesting
in packaging haskell for Linux to communicate about issues?
Perhaps even packaging for all platforms?  What do you think?

Thanks for reaching out and also I would like to say thanks and my respect
for the great work Debian has done and continues to do on Haskell packaging.

Jens