a haskell dev survey

Ladies and gentlemen!

If you happen to be involved in using/developing haskell-powered software you might like to answer our poll on that matter.

Thanks in advance!

GHC as a cross-compiler

Another small breakthrough today for those who would like to see haskell programs running.

Here is a small incomplete HOWTO for gentoo users on how to build a crosscompiler running on x86_64 host targeted on ia64 platform.

It is just an example. You can pick any target.

EAPI=5, ghc-7.6 and other goodies

Today I have unmasked ghc-7.6.1 in gentoo‘s haskell overlay. Quite a few of things is broken (like unbumped yet gtk2hs), but major things (like darcs) seem to work fine. Feel free to drop a line on #gentoo-haskell to get the thing fixed.

Some notes and events in the overlay:

• ghc-7.6.1 is available for all major arches we try to support
• a few ebuilds of overlay were converted to EAPI=5 to use subslot depends (see below)
• we’ve got working ghc-9999 ebuild with shared libraries by default! (see below)

ghc-7.4 in the gentoo tree

A year has passed since last update from gentoo haskell team. Quite a few things have happened in haskell land since:

• ghc-7.2 and 7.4 were released by GHC HQ
• hackage got ever increasing ton of package bumps
• overlay got some of those updates
• cabal test suite by Thomas Tuegel became more popular
• and many others!

gentoo haskell overlay moved to github

We have moved gentoo-haskell overlay to github!

It will require some additional actions for overlay users:

layman -f
layman -d haskell
layman -a haskell

Our move was stimulated by a couple of events:

• code.haskell.org was not very reliable, and

• as you might notice haskell overlay was (and still is) inaccessible since last week. Current status of code.haskell.org can be tracked here.

ghc 6.12.3 goes stable

Good news!

We’ve got ghc-6.12.3 stable on x86, amd64 and sparc arches! (more to come)

What does it mean for end user?

You’ll get latest haskell compiler and will be able to taste it’s new features! We also got rid of hacky ghc-updater and switched to haskell-updater.

Unfortunately, some haskell packages in main tree might stop building on new compiler. Please report them as problematic to gentoo bugzilla or drop a line in #gentoo-haskell on freenode IRC network.

I’ve decided to look back and estimate timeframe it took us to deliver ghc for you:

• 12 Oct 2009 – GHC-6.12 RC1 appears in public
• 2 Nov 2009 – GHC-6.12 RC1 hits gentoo-haskell overlay
• 12 Jun 2010 – GHC-6.12.3 is released
• 26 Sep 2010 – GHC-6.12.3 goes stable on amd64

So, it took us almost 4 months.

The major problems were:

• Resurrect GHC on exotic architectures (we have 10 patches on top of vanilla ghc!). Unfortunately, hppa support was lost.
• Fix packages breaking with 6.10/6.12 branch of ghc (tons of them)

Brave souls can try to install ghc-7-rc2 (aka 7.0.0.20101028) from overlay (currently masked). It has no base-3 (deprecated in ghc-6.10), so you’ll have great chance to become a contributor to various haskell projects!

Enjoy!