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!

ghc-7.4

Yes! ghc-7.4.1 is now in main tree (but masked). We’ve just finished building ghc binaries.

Thus far ghc on gentoo is expected to work on:

alpha, amd64, ppc, ppc64, sparc and x86.

It should also work on arm, but you will have to bootstrap it yourself from ghc-7.0.4 binary. It took me 2 days of CPU time. I’ll try to build proper armv5 binary a bit later.

ia64 support was not restored yet: it needs either patching gcc to support -mcmodel-medium or hacking ghc C Codegen to generate less global objects.

While things generally work in overlay some ~arch things in main tree are still broken against ghc-7.4.1. Please, drop a note on #gentoo-haskell when you find such one. Thanks in advance!

Overlay contributors

For the past year we have got new contributions:

gentoo-haskell $ git shortlog -s -n --since='last year'
2048  Mark Wright
 786  Sergei Trofimovich
  43  Alexander Vershilov
  25  Lennart Kolmodin
   7  Dmitry Dzhus
   5  Mike Limansky
   4  Emil Karlson
   4  jay groven
   3  Florian Schmaus
   3  Tom Prince
   3  exbb2
   2  Jacques Kvam
   2  Oleg 'silver' Osipovich
   1  James Cloos
   1  Jared Hance
   1  Keshav Kini
   1  Naohiro Aota
   1  Oleg Osipovich
   1  Perttu Luukko
   1  Ulya Fokanova
   1  chiro

First of all, a lot of new names!

Mark became the gentoo developer and now helps haskell and science teams to keep the things rolling.

Alexander not only helps us to keep things up-to-date but also managed to tweak hackport to generate USE=profile style depends like the following:

RDEPEND="=dev-haskell/conduit-0.2*[profile?]
         =dev-haskell/stm-2.2*[profile?]
         =dev-haskell/stm-chans-1.3*[profile?]
         =dev-haskell/transformers-0.2*[profile?]
         >=dev-lang/ghc-6.10.1"
DEPEND="${RDEPEND}
        >=dev-haskell/cabal-1.8"

It will help users get less build-time failures when they enable profiling only for a subset of haskell libraries (gentoo bug #341795).

I’ve added a feature to hackport which helps us spy on hackage updates: hackport status --from-hackage.

The following (clickable) sample output should be selfdescriptive:



You can see there leksah, unordered-containers, git-annex and other updates.

Some upstreams don’t upload their releases on hackage. Think about it: by uploading you get more users for free, ease distro packaging and get more feedback! Thanks!