Re: Please merge wip-haskell-updates (Re: [bug#36807] remove obsolete broken haskell packages)

[Timothy Sample <samplet@ngyro.com>]

Hi,

Robert Vollmert <rob@vllmrt.net> writes:

> On 8. Aug 2019, at 15:12, Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com> wrote:
>> I have one comment about the series: we've disabled tests on some
>> packages that have been broken "forever" on i686.  It would be better to
>> do so selectively on just the affected architectures.  I.e.:
>> 
>> #:tests? (if (string-prefix? "i686" (%current-system))
>>              #f
>>              #t)
>> 
>> Preferably with a comment about why they need to be disabled.  That way,
>> we will still notice when something breaks on other architectures.  Can
>> you try it Rob?
>
> I don’t intend to, because I think the effort is better spent elsewhere.
> But do make the change if you like!
>
> The rough plan from my point of view would be to aim for an upgrade of
> the haskell packages to build with ghc-8.6 from a recent stackage LTS
> set, and reevaluate skipped tests across the set while doing that or
> once that’s done.

This was in the back of my mind, too.  Stackage LTS 14.0 (built on top
of GHC 8.6.5) was released three days ago.  Upgrading will involve
sweeping changes to the whole set of Haskell packages, giving us lots of
opportunities to revisit these failing tests.  If we still have problems
with the i686 tests, we can make them conditional then.

Thanks for pointing this out though, Marius.  I had thought about making
them conditional when reviewing, but I second guessed myself because we
have a lot of packages with comments like “tests fail on architecture X”
followed by an absolute “#:tests? #f”.  If this comes up in the future,
I’ll just go ahead and make the tests conditional.


-- Tim