Greetings, I recently fiddled around with stack and tried to make it use installed Debian packages as much as possible. As we are mostly following lts-haskell, I thought setting the right resolver should be enough for stack to use the installed packages.
After finding out which lts is currently in testing, which isn't quite trivial, I found out that we have small differences between testing and the corresponding tls. (I guess the situation with unstable is similar) While this is not unexpected, it makes working with stack on Debian a lot harder. As an example, testing currently comes with text-1.2.1.3, which isn't part of any lts version. This causes stack to install text and any packages which depend on it itself, instead of using the already installed packages. One solution to the problem would be to keep the suites exactly in sync with an lts version, but I think this is unrealistic considering the recent issues with packages which were downgraded on stackage. Another solution I thought about is generating a stack resolver containing all libraries in Debian and shipping it in a Debian package. This would indeed cause stack to use the Debian supplied libraries, but it would also make installing packages not in Debian very tedious, thus defeating the whole purpose of using stack. So I'm out of ideas here. Does anyone else have an idea how to make stack more comfortable to use in Debian? Regards Sven
