Hi Ben, On Sat, Oct 12, 2024 at 12:30PM, Ben Franksen wrote: > I see that the darcs package (https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/darcs) > seems to be stuck at an old version (2.16.5) for some time, which fails > to build due to missing dependencies. As one of the main developers I > would like to ask the package maintainers what we can do to help get > darcs into debian again, preferrably with a more current version. We > have released 2.18.3 some time ago but I am willing to put out another > release to resolve potential dependency problems.
darcs in Debian currently lacks an active maintainer. The Debian Haskell group has stepped up to maintain this package, but since this group is currently responsible for more than 1000 Haskell packages, we don't have the time to resolve issues for individual packages. Everything that doesn't work out-of-the box usually stays behind. Unfortunately, this is the case for darcs. darcs is not part of Stackage (which we use in Debian in order to make sure that all the Haskell libraries play nice together) which means that most of the time doesn't work with the set of packages we have in Debian (that was the case with Stackage LTS 21 which we were using up until now, and you can see this here https://bugs.debian.org/1054953). In addition, the latest version of darcs now depends on strict-identity, which is not part of Debian (hence someone should package it), is not part of Stackage (which means it's less likely to be packaged in Debian) and also seems to be abandoned (no upload for almost 10 years, no replies to issues/patches). Lastly, I recently opened issue https://bugs.debian.org/1082790, to document all of the above issues and see if there is interest to keep darcs in Debian. If I had to suggest an action in order to keep darcs in Debian, I would say please add darcs in Stackage. It helps us make sure that it builds with the set of libraries we have in Debian. It also helps to prevent using deprecated/abandoned software as it's the case with strict-identity now). Hope the above helps, -- Ilias
