Hey everyone,
In the last months using the stackage lts has become a larger maintenance burden which was not very compatible with the way we maintain Haskell packages in nixpkgs. Also we realized that following stackage lts does not really have significant benefits for our use case. (It would make more sense on the stable nixos releases, but we currently don‘t update them automatically anyways.)
That’s why we decided to switch from following stackage-lts to stackage-nightly on master.
This has two important consequences:
- The new default ghc version is 8.10.2 (before it was 8.8.4)
- A large number of packages previously marked broken might built now and the other way around. (But the total number of working Haskell packages has actually slightly risen.) We have made an effort to get essential packages working, but some Haskell packages you rely on might be broken now. Of roughly 15000 packages on hackage 6000 build successfully in nixpkgs, the other 9000 would need manual intervention and are therefor marked broken. If something you care about is marked broken, feel free to open a PR fixing it or open an issue. If you need help with fixing something the
haskellPackages
maintainers team (roughly @peti, @cdepillabout and me) will be glad to help. If you want us to know in the future, that you care about a certain package, you can write yourself into the packages maintainer list.
A short explanation about the haskellPackages
package set in nixpkgs, if you are confused about the above announcement:
We automatically generate derivations for all packages in Hackage and commit them to nixpkgs. As version of a package we take the version from the stackage snapshot (now stackage-nightly) if it’s on stackage or the latest version from hackage, if not. Then we hope that this builds and if not, we either fix it manually or mark it broken. We update the hackage packages automatically every night on the haskell-updates
branch. The haskell-updates
branch then gets merged into master
manually once per week.
The above changes are being merged into master around the time of this post.
Feel free to leave any questions or feedback!
Cheers,
maralorn