Bug#758843: haskell-platform: New upstream version

[Joachim Breitner]

Dear Neil,

Am Dienstag, den 04.08.2015, 17:06 -0600 schrieb Neil Mayhew:
> 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?

Even before we started tracking Stackage, we never promised to ship
precisely the versions as specified in the platform. Often we had to
upgrade a few packages because some of our >700 packages required a
newer version. As we allow at most one version per package in Debian,
it is simply not viable to provide precisely the platform version on
Debian – stackage or not.

Nevertheless we want our users to be able to run
$ apt-get install haskell-platform
and get something that is close enough to the platform. In particular,
it should have all the libraries that the platform recommends.

So far, we never had a user complain that “our” platform packages was a
bit off.

> 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?

Quite possible! If you are interested in that solution, you might want
to discuss it with (<stackage at googlegroups.com>). OTOH I fear that they
will want the same freedom to deviate from the platform that Debian
wants.
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).

I expect stackage LTS-3 to come out very soon now™, which will be based
on 7.10. If not, we switch to tracking Stackage nightlty until LTS-3 is
branched.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: F0FBF51F
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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