stackage VS stack

Writing Haskell programs that rely on third-party packages is still an issue when it’s a not actively maintained package. They get out of date with the base library (Haskell’s standard library), and you might see yourself in a situation where you need to downgrade to an older version. This is not exclusive to Haskell, but it happens more often than I’d like to assume. However, if you only rely on known well-maintained libraries/frameworks such as Aeson, Squeleto, Yesod, and Parsec, to name a few, it’s unlikely you will face troubles at all, you just need to be more mindful of what you add as a dependency. There’s stackage.org now, a repository that works with Stack, providing a set of packages that are proven to work well together and help us to have reproducible builds in a more manageable way—not the solution for all the cases but it’s good to have it as an option.

> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool.

That's what Stackage is.

Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1]

Java will never get this.

[1] https://www.stackage.org/

makefile_dir := $(dir $(abspath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))) export PATH := $(makefile_dir):$(PATH) project_name ?= project_main ?= src/.hs retag_file ?= $(project_main) stack.yaml: @test -f stack.yaml || (echo -e "This makefile requires a 'stack.yaml' for your project.\nYou don't need to use 'stack' to build your project.\nYou just need a 'stack.yaml' specifying a resolver compatible with your GHC version.\nSee https://www.stackage.org/" && exit 1) stack: stack.yaml @which stack || (echo -e "This makefile requires 'stack' to be on your path. Use GHCup to install it.\nSee https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/" && exit 1) .PHONY: stack warning.txt: -@uname -a | grep -q Darwin && echo "WARNING: On Mac, you must alias 'make' to 'gmake' in your shell config file (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Symbolic links will not work." | tee warning.txt @echo "Add 'warning.txt' to your .gitignore file if you never want to see this message again." hasktags: warning.txt stack @echo 'stack exec -- hasktags' > hasktags @chmod +x hasktags @echo "You might like to add 'hasktags' to your .gitignore file." format: stack @stack exec -- fourmolu --stdin-input-file $(project_main) .PHONY: format retag: warning.txt stack @stack exec -- haskdogs -i $(retag_file) --hasktags-args "-x -c -a" | sort -u -o tags tags .PHONY: retag tags: warning.txt hasktags stack @stack exec -- haskdogs .PHONY: tags ghcid: stack @stack exec -- ghcid \ --command 'stack repl --ghc-options "-fno-code -fno-break-on-exception -fno-break-on-error -v1 -ferror-spans -j"' \ --restart stack.yaml \ --restart $(project_name).cabal \ --warnings \ --outputfile ./ghcid.txt .PHONY: ghcid

(why lts-18.28? it's the latest 8.10 release on https://www.stackage.org/ )

I don't see way community maintenance can change the GHC for nightly.

It makes total sense that it fails since at no point I requested that the library be installed, which makes me wonder: Is there any way to request Hackage to install SDL and GLEW before attempting the build? I see Stackage has debian-bootstrap.sh. Does something similar exist for Hackage?

At this point, you can try a Stack snapshot that uses an older version of GHC. Looking at Stackage, you can see that the latest version before 8.10.* is 8.8.4 (using LTS 16.31). Starting over with that snapshot, you find that the packages that you need are in the snapshot and work.

On the contrary, I think this is standard practice for packages which are part of stackage. When stackage nightly switches to a new version of ghc, all the packages which are incompatible with the new ghc are dropped from nightly. My understanding is that maintainers are then expected to fix their packages, at which point more and more packages are included in the nightly snapshot. The next lts to include that version of ghc is only released later, once most packages have been added back, so unlike ghc users who diligently upgrade to the latest ghc, stackage users who diligently upgrade the latest lts snapshot shouldn't see a big drop in the number of compatible packages.

I found the latest stack lts version, and it's associated ghc version here: https://www.stackage.org/

Ah, didn't run into this issue, as I don't use vscode.

Apparently there is some work being done to improve the stack <> hls experience, but I wouldn't know how it's going and when it's being delivered: https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/6154

this is it: # This file was automatically generated by 'stack init' # # Some commonly used options have been documented as comments in this file. # For advanced use and comprehensive documentation of the format, please see: # https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/yaml\_configuration/ # Resolver to choose a 'specific' stackage snapshot or a compiler version. # A snapshot resolver dictates the compiler version and the set of packages # to be used for project dependencies. For example: # # resolver: lts-3.5 # resolver: nightly-2015-09-21 # resolver: ghc-7.10.2 # # The location of a snapshot can be provided as a file or url. Stack assumes # a snapshot provided as a file might change, whereas a url resource does not. # # resolver: ./custom-snapshot.yaml # resolver: https://example.com/snapshots/2018-01-01.yaml resolver: url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/commercialhaskell/stackage-snapshots/master/lts/20/23.yaml # User packages to be built. # Various formats can be used as shown in the example below. # # packages: # - some-directory # - https://example.com/foo/bar/baz-0.0.2.tar.gz # subdirs: # - auto-update # - wai packages: - xmonad - xmonad-contrib # Dependency packages to be pulled from upstream that are not in the resolver. # These entries can reference officially published versions as well as # forks / in-progress versions pinned to a git hash. For example: # # extra-deps: # - acme-missiles-0.3 # - git: https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack.git # commit: e7b331f14bcffb8367cd58fbfc8b40ec7642100a # # extra-deps: [] # Override default flag values for local packages and extra-deps # flags: {} # Extra package databases containing global packages # extra-package-dbs: [] # Control whether we use the GHC we find on the path # system-ghc: true # # Require a specific version of Stack, using version ranges # require-stack-version: -any # Default # require-stack-version: ">=2.11" # # Override the architecture used by Stack, especially useful on Windows # arch: i386 # arch: x86_64 # # Extra directories used by Stack for building # extra-include-dirs: [/path/to/dir] # extra-lib-dirs: [/path/to/dir] # # Allow a newer minor version of GHC than the snapshot specifies # compiler-check: newer-minor

Fix incorrect warning if allow-newer-deps are specified but allow-newer is false. See #6068.

You can download binaries for this pre-release from: Release rc/v2.11.0.1 (release candidate) · commercialhaskell/stack · GitHub .

Fair enough! Thanks for the suggestion, then. In fact, the non-Python language I develop most in (Haskell, with the Stack package manager) has exactly that behaviour as a default: new packages are installed to a sandboxed local directory, and it takes an explicit request to install something globally. (And even then, you can switch between different global "known good configurations" of package versions which work well together – a pretty handy feature.)

Opened a ticket on GitHub.

In YAML configuration files, the hackage-security key of the package-index key or the package-indices item can be omitted, and the Hackage Security configuration for the item will default to that for the official Hackage server. See #5870.

FYI this was solved in here: https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/5958

Yes, that is correct. Stack's allow-newer: true configuration has always actually meant 'ignore bounds'. However, the author of the allow-newer-deps development has in mind a further development that will introduce an actual ignore-bounds key with the same expressive syntax that is used by Cabal. This is discussed at Stack #5910.