Bug#758843: haskell-platform: New upstream version

[Neil Mayhew]

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Hi Joachim,

Thanks for clarifying, and thanks for the work you and the team are
putting into Haskell on Debian.

On 2015-08-04 2:13 PM, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> We (the Debian Haskell Group) plan to follow Stackage LTS releases, and have the haskell-platform
Debian package not necessarily pull in the precise versions of the
platform, but just the choice of packages, in the version that happens
to be in the tracked LTS release.

I can definitely see the advantage of Debian following Stackage LTS for
package versions. However, it seems a little odd to continue to call the
package haskell-platform, since it's based on stackage and not on the
platform itself (although I realize it won't contain the full set of
stackage packages, just the selection that are contained in the
platform). For people (like myself) doing Haskell development on Mac and
Windows as well as Linux, we won't be able to get the same platform on
Debian as we do on the other systems. I wonder if it would be better to
rename the package to stackage-platform or something similar?

I see that Stackage bases itself on specific versions of GHC, and given
the new version numbering scheme of the Haskell Platform, which seems to
be tracking the GHC version it uses, I wonder if in the future Stackage
will use matching versions for the packages that are in the platform?
That would enable having a true haskell-platform package *and* Stackage
versions of all the packages that aren't in the platform itself.

I realize that I can always install the platform myself using the
"Generic Linux" download, and I've had to do that on one of the Ubuntu
Vivid systems that I own because the haskell-platform package there is
very old (2013.2.0.0). However, this goes against the spirit of the
package system and I'd prefer not to have to do it.

> Platform 7.10 requires GHC-7.10. This is ready in experimental, but by the release team’s
request we are (unfortunately) holding off the upload to unstable at
least until the current GCC transition is over.

OK, understood. I just wanted to get the new upstream version of
haskell-platform into the queue.

However, I'm not sure how a packaged GHC 7.10 would fit with Stackage
LTS which is currently based on GHC 7.8. Would you name the package
ghc-7.10 and keep the existing GHC 7.8 as plain ghc? I assume you
wouldn't want to have a bunch of libghc710 packages to go with it,
though (like we used to have with the libghc6 packages).

- --Neil
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