Gentoo Haskell Stack Overlay

Gentoo overlay for installing haskell software via stack

Why

Gentoo's approach to installing haskell software is rare among linux distribution landscape. It involves building each dependency as portage package and registering it in global ghc-pkg registry.

This has two major consequences:

If you install enough haskell packages, you will discover a conflict that cannot be solved
If you are developing in haskell, you have to ignore global packages store somehow

Every haskell library or program has a unique set of dependencies. Possibly requiring different version of ghc as well. Stack is here to help.

Known issues

stack.yaml is usually not bundled in the hackage dist package (see #1)

How to use it

Please amend location and priority to suit your needs.

cat >/etc/portage/repos.conf/haskell-stack <<EOF
[haskell-stack]
location = /usr/portage/haskell-stack
sync-type = git
sync-uri = git://github.com/j1r1k/gentoo-haskell-stack.git
priority = 0
EOF

Configuration

Portage ENV variables

$STACK_RESOLVER - stack resolver to be used when running stack init inside the build

Important notes

stack is distributed as binary.
haskell-stack.eclass is very rough with plenty of TODO
stack has stack-root set to /var/tmp/portage/.stack in order to share downloads in between builds

Contents of this overlay

Most importantly:

dev-haskell/stack-bin - binary distribution of stack

Otherwise:

I am adding packages as I need them. I am basing ebuilds on ebuilds from gentoo-haskell/gentoo-haskell

Discalmer

This is just a proof of concept project. I would love to see this approach more adopted, please feel free to contact me/contribute/fork.