Re: Haskell & Rust Team on recent stable releases of compilers

[Saku Laesvuori <saku@laesvuori.fi>]

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> Hello Guix Devs,
> 
> I've been using Guix for the last few months. As a Haskell programmer,
> I realized the latest stable that's available in the guix package
> repository is 9.2.8 which is _really_ old, considering that the
> current stable releases are at least older than 9.6.x.
> 
> I'd like to contribute to this if I can, since I myself would like to
> have the latest GHC for my uses.  So, how can I get the latest
> versions available? Do I need to add every release, or can I just add
> the most latest?

I think you need to add every other major release to the chain. We
already have 9.2 and 9.4, so 9.6 should not be a problem in that regard.

> Also, is the process of adding a GHC release, or any Haskell package
> any different from the typical procedure to add a package? I'd like
> some introductory guidance/resources to learn that.

Not really, but this specific update (GHC 9.4 to 9.6) is quite tricky
because GHC changed their build system from a make to Hadrian. Hadrian
written in Haskell and depends on quite many packages, so we need to
build all those with an earlier GHC version to be able to build the
current GHC. See https://issues.guix.gnu.org/67921 for the current
situation with this. I am still quite busy with other things in life, so
feel free to pick those patches up.

The Guix manual[1] and cookbook[2] have generic documentation and examples
for creating Guix packages.

[1]: https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html
[2]: https://guix.gnu.org/cookbook/en/guix-cookbook.html

- Saku

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