[aur-general] Initial "haskell overlay" available

[Don Stewart]

Hey all,

A week ago I announced a group had formed to improve Haskell
support in the Arch package system.

One week ago, the Haskell on Arch story was rather sketchy, GHC had just
been orphaned as a package from 'extra', and only half a dozen apps and
libs were available in binary form. 20 or so extra Haskell packages were
available in AUR.

A week later, a lot has happened.

We've now completely automated the packaging of Haskell apps and
libraries, via a new tool, cabal2arch.

    http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=17471

which is able to package 90% of the available Haskell software without
user intervention. This is the first time this has been done on any
distro (Gentoo has similar Haskell package coverage, but it is done
manually)

This enabled us to create a Haskell overlay repository, of binary
packages (x86_64 only):

    http://code.haskell.org/arch/x86_64

with more than 350 packages. Automatically built. An RSS feed of new
things added is also available:

    http://code.haskell.org/arch/x86_64/haskell.xml

Begining with the #arch-haskell IRC channel, we've now got a mailing
list and extensive documentation on the wiki.

    http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haskell_package_guidelines

And the autopackaging has made it possible to migrate more than 300
recipes for building Haskell software into AUR.

I think the rapid progress is a testament to the quality packaging
infrastructure in Arch. Good work!

The next steps are to un-orphan GHC, and the other Haskell things Simo
can't work on now, and to then ensure an appropriate core toolset is
available in extra. Given we don't have a Haskell-expert dev now, advice
on how to proceed here would be welcome.

Cheers,
  Don