On 06/26/2017 08:23 PM, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:

Which, to be fair, has some justification in that technically speaking, statically-compiled haskell programs were an ugly bug. It's just a pity haskell is such a terribly bloated ecosystem. :p

Half a year ago we have a discussion here at arch-general about the dynamic linked future of haskell packages: https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2017-January/042925.html The basic idea is to make the haskell libraries in our official repos less bloated and more friendly to end users, instead of providing all development oriented features. Unfortunately I didn't get enough feedback on that topic. As the ghc package costs more than 1 GiB at that time, I planned to do the switch at 8.0.2 (with also the help of newly added dynlibdir). We still have something to do with the documentation. The HTML docs take some disk space and waste time to build indexes even with the help of a hook. Furthermore, the "ghc" library uses 129 MiB and is not needed if we are going to use ghc-pkg (for library registering) only. (haddock needs the ghc library and we use it to build doc indexes.) -- Regards, Felix Yan

On 06/26/2017 09:42 PM, Sebastian Reuße via arch-general wrote:

Can you advise whether it’s currently possible to do sandboxed static builds at all? The issue I’m running into is that Cabal won’t install sandboxed dependencies if it sees that the corresponding packages are already registered within the global package DB; the build will proceed but will then error out during static linking.

It’s possible to force Cabal/GHC to ignore the global package database altogether, but this won’t help much since it will cause the boot libraries to be ignored as well.

With the current package set the only way I have in mind is to install stack and start from there. This is unfortunately the same for C libraries since our removal of their static libs. An idea is to provide an alternative package database in the ghc-static package that only contains the boot libraries. You will need to ignore global package database and specify that alternative path to use it. Does this sound like useful? -- Regards, Felix Yan

Sebastian Reuße via arch-general writes:

Felix Yan writes:

...

An idea is to provide an alternative package database in the ghc-static package that only contains the boot libraries. You will need to ignore global package database and specify that alternative path to use it. Does this sound like useful?

That does sound preferable to not being able to do sandboxed static builds at all. I’ll also try pinging the Cabal folks when I get a chance; maybe it would make sense for cabal-install to be able to enforce reinstallation of dependencies without listing all packages explicitly.

As a follow-up, Cabal currently tracks issue #1175 [1]. There seems to be a disinclination against implementing «cabal install --reinstall --dependencies-only» in preference to enabling Cabal to track installed files and detect when registered packages have files missing. Since this is tied up with improving Cabal’s package management facilities, my guess is that this isn’t something that will see the light of day too soon; so Felix’ proposed workaround of using an alternative global package DB might be required in the meantime. Kind regards, SR [1] https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/1175 -- Insane cobra split the wood Trader of the lowland breed Call a jittney, drive away In the slipstream we will stay

Without trying to create a flame war, is there any chance to reconsider going back to use static linking with Cabal and Haskell programs? I ask for this because in my case, it has been pretty painful trying to use Cabal to build my code pulling multiple dependencies from Hackage, as I suffered many issues with the linking. In my case most of the issues have come with using the new feature "new-build", which is great in how it solves dependency management but it fails pretty often if you try to use it with dynamic linking. I recently added a section on the wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haskell#Building_statically_linked_pack...) explaining how to get your own cabal-install so that you can use static linking back again, which is working as expected for me, specially with "new-build". I understand there are workarounds like you explained before on how to ignore the global package DB, but not sure it's worth the trouble. Also, I understand going back to static linking would create another trade-off with fatter binaries, but IMHO static linking have important benefits for us the devs and not so many drawbacks for the users of packages statically compiled in the repos. You mentioned before that when you asked to gather some feedback before switching to dynamic linking you didn't get enough responses. I understand that maybe not many Haskell devs on Arch reacted about it, but now talking with other Haskell Arch users (specially on #haskell IRC room), looks like everyone is having some friction with dynamic linking and cabal for your own projects. It feels to me that, as other communities such as the Golang one, have reached the conclusion that dynamic linking isn't worth the trouble with the extra complexity it brings in. Some people say that with distros such as NixOS the problem goes away, no opinion on this, but what matters to me is the current status is in Arch. So guys, opinions on this? —Ricardo On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 11:10 AM, Felix Yan wrote:

On 07/03/2017 02:48 PM, Sebastian Reuße via arch-general wrote:

...

Sebastian Reuße via arch-general writes:

...

Felix Yan writes:

...

...

An idea is to provide an alternative package database in the ghc-static package that only contains the boot libraries. You will need to ignore global package database and specify that alternative path to use it. Does this sound like useful?

...

That does sound preferable to not being able to do sandboxed static builds at all. I’ll also try pinging the Cabal folks when I get a chance; maybe it would make sense for cabal-install to be able to enforce reinstallation of dependencies without listing all packages explicitly.

As a follow-up, Cabal currently tracks issue #1175 [1]. There seems to be a disinclination against implementing «cabal install --reinstall --dependencies-only» in preference to enabling Cabal to track installed files and detect when registered packages have files missing. Since this is tied up with improving Cabal’s package management facilities, my guess is that this isn’t something that will see the light of day too soon; so Felix’ proposed workaround of using an alternative global package DB might be required in the meantime.

Thanks for the info. Please try out ghc{,-static} 8.0.2-2 which is in [community-testing] now.

This is an example of how it works for me:

$ cabal sandbox init $ cabal install --ghc-pkg-option="--global-package-db=/usr/lib/ghc-8.0.2/static-package.conf.d" alex

-- Regards, Felix Yan

Eli Schwartz via arch-general writes:

On 06/26/2017 02:45 AM, Óscar García Amor wrote:

...

Hello all,

Some days ago the pandoc mantainer [1] do a rebuild of it [2] where add a lot of haskell package dependencies. I think that the build changes the binary from statically linked to dinamically linked, but IMHO, I prefer the static one (55,08 MiB of package) over the dinamic (more than 666 MB in libraries).

What do you think about this?

Other solution can be have other package "pandoc-static", that maintains the previous method of package.

Greetings.

[1]: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/pandoc/ [2]: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/commit/trunk?h=packages/pandoc&id=d340c92f8cf5686509551c08bcdaa0b5e66760b0

And same with shellcheck -- the general issue is that *all* haskell-based packages now build dynamically linked against the haskell runtime (which is huge, and few people have more than one or two packages that need it).

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227621 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227477 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227574 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54564 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54590 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54588 https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/54580

Seems like the official response is "just live with it, no one cares what you say".

Which, to be fair, has some justification in that technically speaking, statically-compiled haskell programs were an ugly bug. It's just a pity haskell is such a terribly bloated ecosystem. :p

That being said, there are pandoc-lite and shellcheck-static packages in the AUR which use upstream's prebuilt binaries and don't require the whole haskell ecosystem as a dependency. Which seems fairly reasonable to me.

There's also the ArchHaskell repo: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchHaskell Some, but not all, binaries are split out into separate packages. Look for *-tool packages /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0x927912051716CE39 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true. — Albert Einstein