State of haskell-devscripts and dh-haskell

[Felix Lechner]

Hi,

I believe the Perl rewrite of haskell-devscripts is nearly complete
now. The package should probably be merged into dh-haskell eventually.

The Perl module should then become private, i.e. be shipped outside
Perl's system path. It will discourage direct access of the sort that
was documented in library.mk.

For the time being, dh-haskell provides no bells and whistles. Any
functionality you'd like to adopt—such as having certain substvars
available—must be enabled manually. Fortunately, that is now easy due
to the many small dh_* scripts.

For the libraries from Hackage it means that any d/rules using the dh
sequencer will include additional statements similar to the ones now
found in hlibrary.mk, but instead in execute_after_dh_auto_install.

Perhaps the build system should be augmented through the use of
environmental variables. A setting of DH_HASKELL_MODULE=1 for example
(or perhaps merely the presence of CABAL_PACKAGE) could enable the
additional functionality needed in so many places. It should go right
here in Debhelper's new Haskell build system. [1]

Unfortunately, I recently switched to another operating system and may
not be available to work on Debian's Haskell toolchain much longer—but
I will still keep an eye out for new bugs for a little while longer.

Kind regards,
Felix Lechner

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/haskell-team/dh-haskell/-/blob/history/lib/Debian/Debhelper/Buildsystem/haskell.pm#L203