Maintaining a large set of Haskell packages for a Linux distribution is quite
a chore. Especially if one wants to track Hackage as far as possible.
Several distributions have tools to automatically convert Cabal-based packages
into distribution packages, e.g. cabal2arch for ArchLinux and
cabal-rpm. They are just conversion tools though, and the most
time-consuming activity in maintaining Haskell packages is resolving
and verifying dependencies.
At least that was my experience when I was actively involved in
ArchHaskell. I only saw two options when adding or upgrading a package,
either I worked out dependencies manually, or I simply tried it out. Neither
of them was very appealing, and both were very time-consuming. It seemed
obvious that I needed some tool to help out.
Enter cblrepo!
It allows me to maintain a database of specific versions of packages, and when
I want to upgrade a package, or add a new one, it’ll verify that all
dependencies can be satisfied. In other words, it helps me maintain a
buildable set of packages at all times.
The tool also has some functionality that helps in tracking Hackage as
packages are updated there.
Something about how it works
At the moment I maintain a small repository of Arch packages, mostly just to
try out cblrepo and convince myself that it works. The work environment
contains a database and a directory of patches:
% ls
cblrepo.db patches/
%
The database is a cleartext file containing the information on the packages.
It’s basically just a dump of the related Haskell datatype, encoded in JSON.
The patches directory holds patches for Cabal files and PKGBUILD files.
They must be named patch.cabal.<hackage name> or patch.pkgbuild.<hackage
name> in order to be picked up by cblrepo.
There’s also an application directory (~/.cblrepo) for caching info about
the packages available on Hackage:
% ls ~/.cblrepo
00-index.tar.gz
%
How to use it
A session with cblrepo looks something like this. First we update the
information about what packages are available on Hackage:
% cblrepo idxsync
%
After that it’s possible to see what packages are out-of-date:
% cblrepo updates
cmdargs: 0.6.8 (0.6.9)
test-framework-th: 0.1.3 (0.2.0)
xml: 1.3.7 (1.3.8)
language-haskell-extract: 0.1.2 (0.2.0)
blaze-builder: 0.2.1.4 (0.3.0.0)
%
Let’s check whether cmdargs can be updated:
% cblrepo add -n cmdargs,0.6.9
%
It generates no output, so that means it’s possible to update. When
attempting to add all the packages we run into a problem:
% cblrepo add -n cmdargs,0.6.9 \
> test-framework-th,0.2.0 \
> xml,1.3.7 \
> language-haskell-extract,0.2.0 \
> blaze-builder,0.3.0.0
Adding blaze-builder 0.3.0.0 would break:
haxr : blaze-builder ==0.2.*
We’ll leave blaze-builder at the current version for now:
% cblrepo add cmdargs,0.6.9 \
> test-framework-th,0.2.0 \
> xml,1.3.7 \
> language-haskell-extract,0.2.0
%
After these updates we also need to make sure that all packages that depend on
these ones are re-built, that is we need to bump their release version:
% cblrepo bump -n cmdargs \
> test-framework-th \
> xml \
> language-haskell-extract
Would bump:
test-framework
test-framework-hunit
test-framework-quickcheck2
%
Just re-run that without the -n to actually perform the bump. Now that all
this is done we need to generate the files necessary to build the Arch
packages. We can easily check what packages need re-building, and get a good
order for building them:
% cblrepo build cmdargs \
> test-framework-th \
> xml \
> language-haskell-extract
cmdargs
xml
test-framework
test-framework-quickcheck2
test-framework-hunit
language-haskell-extract
test-framework-th
%
And generating the required files is also easy:
% cblrepo pkgbuild $(!!)
% tree
.
|-- cblrepo.db
|-- haskell-cmdargs
| |-- haskell-cmdargs.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-language-haskell-extract
| |-- haskell-language-haskell-extract.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-test-framework
| |-- haskell-test-framework.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-test-framework-hunit
| |-- haskell-test-framework-hunit.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-test-framework-quickcheck2
| |-- haskell-test-framework-quickcheck2.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-test-framework-th
| |-- haskell-test-framework-th.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
|-- haskell-xml
| |-- haskell-xml.install
| `-- PKGBUILD
`-- patches
8 directories, 15 files
%
Now all that’s left is running makepkg in each of the directories, in the
order indicated by cblrepo build above.
Unfortunately they won’t all build—generating the Haddock docs for
test-framework-th fails. That’s however fairly easy to remedy by patching
the PKGBUILD to disable the generation of docs.
I’ll get back to that in a later post though.
Your comments, please
Please leave comments and suggestions. I’m planning on uploading the source
to github shortly.
#
However, the sender also mentioned that the 
