On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 12:14:15PM +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote: > > Is anyone (or any team) interested in taking over maintenance of ghc6 > and related packages?
A couple of people have asked me what is involved; this is what comes to mind: First, there is all the standard Debian maintainer stuff. That means: * Adapting the Debian packaging for new ghc releases * Improving the way ghc is packaged * Fixing Debian-specific bugs reported on the Debian BTS * Forwarding non-Debian-specific bugs reported on the Debian BTS to the GHC BTS * Helping users who may occasionally e-mail you http://www.debian.org/devel/ has a number of relevant docs, including "New Maintainers' Guide", "Developer's Reference" and "Debian Policy Manual". For Haskell-specific stuff, http://urchin.earth.li/~ian/haskell-policy/ should be more-or-less up-to-date, although some details probably differ. What makes ghc particularly fun is: * When you upload a package, it is automatically built on around 10 architectures. If the build on one of them makes a broken ghc, then you will have to manually fix that architecture, either by doing so yourself or by finding a porter of that architecture to do so for you. One way to do so without root is to manually unpack the previous deb, change the paths in package.conf as appropriate, and build a new package. * Sometimes ghc will break on some arches for other reasons, e.g. if gcc is updated and ghc doesn't work with the new gcc. This is rare on arches other than x86 and amd64 at the moment, as the other arches are currently unregisterised. If it does happen then you either need to find someone with a machine of the right arch willing to install the older gcc (or whatever) version so that you can compile a ghc with the fix, or re-bootstrap ghc on that arch. * GHC uses a lot of memory when compiling some files, including some files in the ghc package itself. Language.Haskell.TH.Syntax is one example. This causes problems for some of the autobuilders, which don't have much RAM. Currently we don't build GHCi or TH on anything except x86 and amd64, so Language.Haskell.TH.Syntax doesn't get built, but with 6.10 there'll be no reason not to. We (upstream) are working on improving the memory use, but we're running out of time before 6.10. * Building GHC takes a while, so doing builds while working on the packaging obviously takes time (and CPU, and memory, and disk space). * Due to cross-module-inlining, when using Haskell libraries, the library dependencies must have the same ABI as they did when the library was compiled. For normal Haskell library packages we depend on the exact package version, which solves this. However, the bootlibs come in the ghc6 package, and we don't want to have to reupload every single Haskell library every time ghc is tweaked, so instead you need to be careful not to change the ABI when uploading a new ghc package. That's all I can think of OTTOMH. Thanks Ian _______________________________________________ debian-haskell mailing list [email protected] http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/debian-haskell
