Re: heads-up: Haskell updates

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello,

Ricardo Wurmus <address@hidden> skribis:

> I’ve just pushed a very large number of updates to Haskell packages and
> switched to GHC 8 as the default.

Thanks for the heroic work!

> * updating Haskell packages automatically is dangerous as not all
>   packages work well together.  When updating I often had to take a few
>   steps back to reduce the version number.  On Hackage I picked the LTS
>   version where available.

Does that mean that Hackage provides a package set that doesn’t work
well together?  Or is it a defect in our updater?

I think it would be great if running “guix refresh -t hackage” would
give us a package set that works together, provided Hackage does the
necessary QA.  (I thought it did because Nixpkgs imports all of it
wholesale AIUI.)

> * this is based on my previous work from October 2016.  Only few
>   packages had been updated since then, so most of my changes still
>   applied.  When it wasn’t necessary I didn’t bother updating my
>   updates.  This means that a second pass could be useful to update
>   packages that are below their LTS versions.
>
>   In general I think we really need someone who feels responsible for
>   *all* the Haskell packages.  It’s not okay to keep most of them at old
>   versions for over a year.

Agreed, we need a Haskell champion to take care of this—not necessarily
to do all the actual work themself, but rather to keep track of what’s
lagging behind, what needs to be done, and to coordinate efforts.  My
impression is that people have been willing to help on this in the past
but didn’t necessarily know what upgrading would entail.

If you’re reading this and feel familiar with Haskell’s infrastructure,
please don’t hesitate to chime in!

Thanks,
Ludo’.