[arch-dev-public] Todos for language specific rebuilds

[Eli Schwartz]

On 1/11/20 4:51 PM, Jelle van der Waa wrote:

> Some languages however require special treatment such as Haskell and
> require rebuilds from GHC => Haskell-foo => Haskell-bar etc which can
> become complicated. For example if I want to update a dependency of
> taskell I will have to rebuild all depending programs/libs so tooling
> which makes that easier is welcome to me. I know Felix has some stuff
> but we should make this more visible.

Haskell is *not* different. Haskell is an excellent example of a
language where problems can be caught by the person doing the rebuild,
because it's all shared libraries which can be caught by our soname
detection.

Sure, haskell is complex and fiddly and requires complex rebuilds for
every trivial change, which requires complex orchestration to pull off,
but the underlying cause isn't all that complex.

This thread was founded with the premise that language maintainers
should not just do silent rebuilds, because package maintainers need to
do it themselves in order to know the resulting packages work.

You're arguing instead, that it's fine for Haskell to be rebuilt
automatically... but that we need to preserve valuable institutional
knowledge on how the current maintainer handles this, to reduce the bus
factor and, I guess, that if Felix retires no one will know how to
rebuild haskell anymore. This is an important topic which deserves
discussion about documenting HOWTOs, but is, I think, ultimately
unrelated to and a distraction from, *this* thread.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 1601 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20200111/e776afe6/attachment.sig>