Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2021 13:51:10 +0100
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Cc: Mitch Tishmack <mitch.tishmack@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Remove haskell compiler (ghc) from alpine
From: =?UTF-8?Q?S=C3=B6ren?= Tempel <soeren@soeren-tempel.net>
References: <20211021133615.32f08070@ncopa-desktop.lan>
In-Reply-To: <20211021133615.32f08070@ncopa-desktop.lan>
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Hello,

Just a quick follow: Both GHC and Cabal have been upgraded and fixed. As
such, I am very happy to report that we will ship 3.15 with Haskell
support. 3.15_rc4 is the first release candidate to include both Cabal
and GHC again.

GHC has been upgraded to 9.0.1 [1], Cabal has been bootstrapped from
source using the Python script provided by upstream [2] and upgraded to
3.6.2.0 [3] all packages listed in the original mail have been rebuild
and enabled again.

If you encounter any issues with these packages, please let us know.

Thanks a lot to Lukas Epple from NixOS for helping out with Cabal.

Greetings,
S=C3=B6ren

[1]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/commit/1020873d7db7cec6=
a6a406d46588e62c958dcf48
[2]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/commit/ddc474c6a4c3b2b6=
3c84d120f9df10d46c3367d2
[3]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/commit/123bb7c27923b5af=
ab53ff7f6fbf2e81b3d88e77

Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org> wrote:
> ## TL;DR
>=20
> ghc is blocking the 3.15 release, so I wonder if we can remove
> the following packages:
>=20
> - community/gch
> - community/cabal
> - community/shellcheck
> - testing/pandoc
> - testing/apostrophe
>=20
> ## longer explanation
>=20
> Maintaining ghc and cabal packages requries significant amount
> of time and skills. To my understanding, upstream recommends use ghcup
> to install haskell, not the distro package.
>=20
> We use shellcheck in our CI but shellcheck is available from upstream
> as a statically precompiled binary[1] which we can use for our infra.
>=20
> pandoc is also available as precompiled binary[2].
>=20
> But those cannot be used as dependencies for other packages which means
> that we cannot provide a package for testing/apostrophe or
> testing/py3-pypandoc.
>=20
> Would it be ok to remove those packages to save ourselves from
> significant amount of maintenance work?
>=20
> Alternatively, are there anyone who have time and skills to take
> maintenance for those? What needs to be done:
>=20
> - complete the update of ghc to 9.0.2 [3]:
>   - either revert back to system libffi (and add comment in libffi
>     package that special care is needed when upgrading libffi due to
>     ghc needing ghc to update) or solve how the bundled libffi is handled=
=2E
>   - find out how to update cabal. one of the following alternatives
>     needs to be done:
>     a) copy the way boostrap.sh from cabal 3.2.0.0 works (fetch and
>        build all the needed deps together with cabal-install itself).
>     b) figure out if/how we can use cabal's bootstrap.py[4]
>     c) find out how to use previous cabal to update cabal (another
>        circular dep) and investigate what the consequences of that is.
>        (any external dependencies will need special care when the are
>        upgraded).
>     d) create apk packages for the dependencies, similar to what arch
>        linux does[5]. eg package for uusi[6], haskell-hashable[7] etc.
>   - split out ghc-libs runtime libraries
>=20
> - rebuild everything using the ghc (shellcheck, pandoc, py3-pypandoc
>   etc)
>=20
> - figure out and document how to do the haskell-* packages in case
>   option d) was chosen above. Maybe also add support for haskell
>   packages in newapkbuild.
>=20
> - figure out how to bootstrap ghc and cabal for the remaining
>   architectures. At least aarch64.
>=20
> I have already spent way too many days on ghc and would prefer that
> someone else takes over or that we remove it.
>=20
> [1]: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/releases/tag/v0.7.2
> [2]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases/tag/2.14.2
> [3]: https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/merge_requests/20134
> [4]: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/tree/master/bootstrap
> [5]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/cabal-=
install/trunk/PKGBUILD
> [6]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/uusi/t=
runk/PKGBUILD
> [7]: https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-community/blob/packages/haskel=
l-hashable/trunk/PKGBUILD