On 2002-05-28T14:50:22-0400, Norman Ramsey wrote: > > I _could_ make readline a hard dependency of ghc, but this is somehow > > not satisfactory. I'd rather like readline to be out-factored to its > > own package (I know, this would break other Haskell programs, but it's > > arguably easy-to-fix breakage...). > > Comments? > For a newbie like me, it would be useful to have a `virtual' package > ghc-util for `ghc programs that need util'. This could then require > libreadline4-dev. The key is that something show up in > dpkg --list ghc* > Otherwise the need for libreadline4-dev is not obvious to the amateur.
This dependency on libreadline4-dev seems to be a special case of a more
general issue, namely how to handle packages in the GHC sense in the
Debian packaging system. The way Perl module code is packaged for
Debian seems to be quite sophisticated: Perl packages tend to correspond
to individual Debian packages, so if a Perl program packaged for Debian
uses a certain module, only that module (roughly speaking) needs to be
installed, and will be automatically. Ideally, GHC packages would be
handled in a similar way, but is it worth the trouble?
- On one hand, since GHC does not yet support dynamic linking,
programs compiled by GHC do not depend on Haskell modules or GHC
packages.
- On the other hand, there are relatively few GHC packages.
(And Norman, welcome to Debian :)
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