[Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Bug#654628: haskell-cmdargs: FTBFS on many arches: Template Haskell bracket illegal in a stage-1 compiler

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

Note that while CmdArgs 0.9 introduces a dependency on TH, it's only
optional. If you disable the cabal flag "quotation" then it will build
without template-haskell, so should still work fine on ARM.

I do have a dependency on template-haskell in the .cabal file, it's
just under an if flag(quotation) branch, so isn't with the rest of the
dependencies. Note that it isn't necessary to use template-haskell
just because you use TemplateHaskell, but it would be rather
challenging not to (you couldn't mention Q or any of the AST types).

Thanks, Neil

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Joachim Breitner <nomeata at debian.org> wrote:
> Dear Clint,
>
> Am Mittwoch, den 04.01.2012, 19:02 +0000 schrieb Clint Adams:
>> On Wed, Jan 04, 2012 at 06:35:52PM +0000, Joachim Breitner wrote:
>> > the fact that a package is using Template Haskell is not represented in
>> > the cabal file, so there is actually nothing to do for Neil. It should
>> > be noted, though, in debian/control by a Build-Dependency on ghc-ghci.
>>
>> I am confused, because many packages (for example yesod-core and
>> snap-server), have cabal dependencies on "template-haskell".
>
> and it is confusing indeed. template-haskell is a library that provides
> the Language.Haskell.TH module. So you can have a library that uses
> these functions, without actually requiring a TH-capable compiler (e.g.
> it only provides functions based on these that a user _might_ use. You
> can also have (as it seems to be the case here) that a library uses the
> TemplateHaskell feature without actually using any of the symbols
> defined in the template-haskell library.
>
> Rule of thumb: If TemplateHaskell appears in the cabal file or a
> LANGUAGE pragma, then the Debian package ought to depend on the ghc-ghci
> virtual package.
>
> Greetings,
> Joachim
>
> --
> Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
> Debian Developer
>  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
>  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata