[Fedora-haskell-list] Planning for the Haskell Platform

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> GHC 6.10.1 will be the last release that ships with extralibs, the
> "metapackage" of libraries that has been comaintained with GHC since
> forever.
>
> In fact, extralibs will be obsoleted within the lifetime of GHC
> 6.10.1. Its replacement, the Haskell Platform, should be released
> within a month after 6.10.1 itself. The Platform will develop and be
> maintained on a schedule independent of GHC, so it no longer makes
> sense to tie the two together.
>
> Since GHC without extralibs/Platform is completely useless for
> practical development, we need to sort out a strategy for this pretty
> soon.
>
> One simple possibility: split the ghc package up now. Initially create
> a "ghc-platform" subpackage in the same spec file, containing
> extralibs. Make the ghc package depend on ghc-platform, so it will be
> autoinstalled by a depsolver. When the real platform is released,
> split ghc into toplevel ghc and ghc-platform packages, chop out the
> ghc-platform subpackage from the ghc spec file, but don't rebuild the
> ghc package (since not necessary). A build of the new ghc-platform
> package should supersede the old subpackage (since rpm itself doesn't
> seem to know about subpackages at all). Someone installing ghc after
> the splitup should get the old ghc and the new ghc-platform.
>
> Does this sound reasonable? The only actions required from anyone else
> in the next week or two are to (a) state an opinion on this and, if
> it's generally positive (b) for someone to review a placeholder
> ghc-package review request, so we can crank in a timely manner when
> the final platform is released.

+1