[arch-dev-public] [Draft] - News announcement for GHC 7.8.2

[Thomas Dziedzic]

Thanks Xyne,

1) I'm not opposed to recommending a tool in the aur if it greatly
simplifies a problem.
I checked out your pkg-topological_reinstall script and although it looks
good for its purpose, I'm afraid that none of the files generated solve the
issue of removing haskell-transformers, upgrading ghc, then installing the
missing packages.
I will just mention that the user should reinstall the packages the user
removed with pacman -Rcs haskell-transformers.

2) Good point, I forgot about arch-haskell when I was writing this email.
I will definitely mention them as an unofficial repo.

Here is the updated post:

Title:
GHC 7.8.2 requires user intervention and brings changes.

Content:
The package haskell-transformers was previously a separate package but is
now provided with ghc 7.8.2. Since ghc 7.8.2 does not replace
haskell-transformers 0.3.0.0, the user must run the following command prior
to upgrading the packages:

pacman -Rcs haskell-transformers

Don't forget to reinstall the packages that got removed from the above
command after upgrading ghc.

Changes that come with the release include:
1) Moving every package that is not ghc or cabal-install to [community].
This will allow better support of the core common haskell libraries since I
do not actually use these packages due to cabal-install.

2) The valid paths that a user can take to install packages are the
following:

 a) Using cabal-install to install haskell packages. This allows the user
to access every haskell package in hackage. The problem is that you are now
using packages that are managed outside of pacman. This is usually the best
option if you are developing any haskell applications due to the new
sandboxing that cabal-install 1.18 has introduced.

 b) Using pacman to install haskell packages. This allows the user to have
access to a small subset of hackage packages which are known to work on
archlinux and are usually good enough for non haskell developers.

 c) Using an unofficial repository called Arch Haskell. You could find more
information about the repository at the following page:
https://github.com/archhaskell/habs/blob/master/README.md

 Note: These 3 paths should be considered mutually exclusive.