[darcs-users] 2.8 beta 3

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

Hi Jens,

On 20/01/2012 05:34, Jens Petersen wrote:
>> I've uploaded darcs 2.8 beta 3 to hackage. You can install it with
>> 'cabal install darcs-beta'.
> 
> Thanks, I just built it locally on my Fedora 16 box,
> though I patched the .cabal file to allow regex-compat-0.93.1.
> 
> Is it possible to relax the regex-compat and regex-posix depends,
> so that darcs-2.8 will also build with haskell-platform-2011.2?
> 
> I am happy to contribute a patch for that if it helps.

The reason for the lower bounds is that Owen found a segfault in the
regex library. We vaguely discussed this back in June:

On 30/06/2011 Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> The patches in question are
> 
> http://bugs.darcs.net/patch598
> http://bugs.darcs.net/patch605
> 
> to fix
> 
> http://bugs.darcs.net/issue2065
> 
> It may be expedient to temporarily roll back the version bump and the
> regex checking for 2.8 (ideally only on the branch) for distro
> friendliness. We can expect the platform to have caught up by 2.10.

The basic situation is that in the course of fixing issue2065, Owen
exposed a segfault in the regex lib. In fact his patch to fix issue2065
(which provides better/earlier error messages when you have bad regexes
in your boring file) was never actually committed, which was an
oversight, and one that I would remedy now on the 2.8 branch if not for
the regex dependency issue.

But it does make it fairly easy to leave out of the 2.8 branch and push
down the regex dependencies for this release.

Of course things have moved on slightly since June in that there is now
haskell-platform 2011.4 which does have regex-compat and regex-posix
0.95.1, though I do realise that distros generally won't have that yet.

So I guess it's a trade-off between having released distributions like
Fedora having easy support for darcs 2.8 via a package (cabal install
darcs should work ok as it'll just install the new regex libs
side-by-side with the distro ones, which I realise isn't appropriate for
a package to do), or leaving this fairly minor but still nice fix out of
2.8.

What do you think? When will Fedora have haskell-platform 2011-4?

Cheers,

Ganesh