status of ghc / haskell transition

[Ilias Tsitsimpis]

Hi Paul,

On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 09:18PM, Paul Gevers wrote:
> From a bystander view as a Release Manager, the situation looks a bit
> stalled. So I'd like to know if there is any progress and/or if there are
> plans to unlock the current situation.

Unfortunately, Haskell transitions are too much work and we are
shorthanded in the Haskell team to handle the load of work.
This transition has been especially hard for us because we were dealing
with a broken GHC in unstable (see [1] and [2]). Fixing GHC is what took
most of the time, since we needed to migrate to a new build system and
essentially redo all the packaging work for GHC.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/1051493
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/1052306

> Can you enlighten us, what's the plan?

The plan is:

1. Fix GHC. We uploaded a new version in unstable yesterday that
   hopefully fixes both of the above issues.

2. Rebuild all packages (binNMUs) with the new GHC.

3. Try to finish the transition by upgrading the remaining packages.

> Do you need help from us?

Can you please schedule the necessary binNMUs for the new GHC? We have a
list here [3] that is updated every 4 hours. We are currently blocked
until this happens, as we need all existing packages to build with the
new GHC.

Note that we will definitely need more binNMUs down the road, will ping
you again for this.

[3] https://people.debian.org/~iliastsi/binNMUs-haskell.txt

Thanks,

-- 
Ilias