- Thursday, August 10 2023
- Combined notes from two meetings
- Introductions
- Free form discussion
Some topics came up a lot:
- Nix
- Haskell fragility
- Repository automation
- Everybody on both calls uses Nix.
- haskell.nix was originally created to cross-compile for Windows. (Building Haskell on Windows is challenging.)
- "A lot of haskell.nix [features] should be in GHC and Cabal...."
- A few people use Hydra for Nix builds, though not without misgivings.
- GitHub Actions–Hydra integration was mentioned.
- Cabal is a spec, but one that hasn't been implemented in Nix.
- The fact that the same project can't be built with GHC
$x$ and GHC$x+1$ simultaneously (due to breaking changes in GHC, base libraries, or both) came up as a big challenge for doing early testing of new GHC releases. - Haskell (and Cabal) are both very expressive, which leads to fragility.
- Everyone depends on the Cabal library to do Haskell dependency management. Where it isn't available (e.g. Nixpkgs), solutions aren't very robust.
- We agreed some kind of automation for dependency management would be nice.
- Someone mentioned that the recent tool haskell-bounds-bump-action may fill the niche for some.