Hi Greg,
On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 08:37:03AM -0800, Greg Steuck wrote:
> I noticed we have a few bound relaxation patches that approximate the
> cabal behavior of downloading revised package files from hackage. I
> propose we build a tiny bit more common mechanism into ghc.mk that
> would copy files/*.cabal files if they exist over into $WRKDIST. Then
> we can replace a few patches with copies of complete files from
> hackage that their authors submitted.
I don't understand the benefit of complete copies of .cabal files
over patches.
IMHO, the annoying part when updating a hs-port (or writing a new
one) is, that after a build failure caused by too strict dependency
constraings, you'll have *always* to look wether there's a "revised"
package description available, and, if so, adopt the changes to the
port -- wether you do so in form of a patch against the .cabal file
in the DISTFILE or by copying the rvised .cabal file to files/
doesn't look like a big difference to me.
There's also the risk of forgetting to remove a .cabal file from
files/ when updating a port to a newe version. When you forget to
rm a patch against a .cabal file, you'll end up with a conflict
during make patch. With the files/ approach, you would probably end
up with weird build failures.
> If this sounds good I'll figure out which ports we can clean up this way.
I had a quick look with ls */*/patches/patch-*_cabal. There are 25
patches against .cabal files (not counting the one in lang/ghc).
Not all of them contain constraints changes only. Is it really worth
the (potential) trouble for such a relatively low number of ports?
Ciao,
Kili
