darcs takes forever to install - can we install a prebuilt binary instead?

[kowey@…]

Hello!

We have a sort of longstanding problem in the Darcs community, which I'm hoping MacPorts could help with.

1. Installing Darcs requires installing GHC, which for various reasons, takes a very long time to install.

2. Often the kinds of people who install Darcs are "involuntary" users, ie. folks who don't care about version control systems, but just want to install Darcs so they can grab some source tree

3. These people (already yak-shave impeded from completing their main task) type "sudo port install darcs"... and find that it doesn't complete until 12 hours or later or something absurd

4. Therefore they decide that they hate Darcs.

This is a sort of recurring pattern that hurts Darcs reputation a lot. We'd love to make a better first impression on our users. Can MacPorts help?

Installing a version control system is a case where taking a very long time to install can be extremely harmful to the first time user experience, because the first time you decide to install that system is often when you're impatient to get something else done and are definitely not prepared to wait.

Would it be at all possible for the Darcs port to install a prebuilt binary by default? If it helps, we now have an official MacOS X binary for Darcs (which we did not before 2010).

A variant that does this would be better than nothing, but I worry that it would only be marginally useful unless it was a default, or failing that, unless the Darcs port could somehow jump up and down and say "Hey! You should use the binary instead!"

Thanks!

[gwright@…]

This can't be done with the current 6.10.4 port, because of the requirement for some external libraries. However, the underlying linker bug which has prevented building 6.12.x on Snow Leopard is finally fixed, so a statically linked binary can now be built.

This won't happen overnight, since there is still the issue of forcing a 32 bit build on 64 bit Snow Leopard. We need this for platforms (e.g., older MacBooks) that don't support 64 bit. A universal build is also possible, but this has only just become possible and isn't well tested.

This will eventually get done, but after the binary ghc platform installer, which will be my next project after getting the upcoming 7.0.1 built.

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

There are no prebuilt binaries for any port. Getting a binary distribution is not only blocked by missing resources, but also unclear legal situation (for example GPL vs. openssl).

[kowey@…]

If it helps any, I think a prebuilt binary for GHC (unlikely as it may be due to missing human resources) would be more than good enough in terms of making port install darcs faster.

[jmroot (Joshua Root)]

If license information were to be set for darcs and its dependencies, and none of the licenses conflict, then binaries would now be made available automatically (albeit Snow Leopard only for now).

[raimue (Rainer Müller)]

Port abandoned, #35561.

[neverpanic (Clemens Lang)]

MacPorts has had binary distribution for a while. Most parts of the haskell setup get shipped as binary without building on a user's computer. If darcs' license allows it, a binary will also be automatically installed where available for it. For this reason, I consider this bug fixed.

I am not going to replace the darcs port with one that installs a pre-built binary not built by the MacPorts buildbot, and I'm pretty much the only maintainer working on haskell related ports at the moment.