Bug#895264: updates

[Antoine Beaupré]

[Context, for the list: there are new upstream releases for Taffybar, a
status bar for tiling window managers written in Haskell. Those depend
on newer GUI-related packages which, in turn, might break other related
packages. All this might depend on a GHC update as well. This email
tries to clarify where the current status is after some progress
happened upstream and I figured things are more in Debian's camp now.]

On 2018-05-15 15:28:24, Antoine Beaupre wrote:
> There is yet another new version (2.0.0) which introduces, again, new
> dependencies (like xml-helpers, tuple, and gtk-sni-tray).

And again another version (3.0.0):

https://github.com/taffybar/taffybar/blob/v3.0.0/CHANGELOG.md

This time only one (breaking) change:

 * Taffybar has replaced gtk2hs with gi-gtk everywhere. All widgets must
   now be created with gi-gtk.

Seems it should be easier to deal with than the 2.0 jump, although I am
not sure gi-gtk is packaged in Debian.. And we still need to go through
the 2.0 jump itself, of course.

Fortunately, blockers to get taffybar shipped in Stackage have been
resolved with a shiny new Xmonad 0.14 release, nothing less.

Unfortunately, we have another blocker on Debian's side now, as we're
stuck on GHC 8.2 there:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ghc

That is because GHC 8.4 fails to compile on lesser-used architectures
like ARM, MIPS or S390x... It *might* be possible to build Taffybar 3.0
with 8.2, however: there's a stack-8.2.yml file which seems to be up to
date...

I'm still unclear about how the extra dependencies play out in the new
version, unfortunately. It still seems that dbus is lagging behind -
Debian has 0.10.15-1+b1 and Taffybar's stack.yml requires 1.0.1. As
previously mention, this might break other dependencies of dbus.

Is there a way to parse a stack.yml file and figure out how it maps into
Debian package dependencies?

A.

-- 
Freedom of speech is a principal pillar of a free government; when
this support is taken away, the constitution of a free society is
dissolved, and tyranny is erected on its ruins.
                        - Benjamin Franklin, 1737