A Plea to Reduce Dependences (e.g., for swig)

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 10:18, bradley newton haug wrote:

> 
> On Aug 16, 2011, at 3:51 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> According to the comment in the ghc portfile, only Perl 5.8 is usable. I don't understand the details of why.
>> 
>> The ghc port is rather out of date. Unfortunately our ghc maintainer has not been very active in recent years. If somebody else is interested in taking over ghc, perhaps that would help.
>> 
>> There is an open request to update it to a later version:
>> 
>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/25558
>> 
> 
> does anyone use this?

Only in that some ports I've used pull it in as a dependency.

> I'm personally not a fan of the official binary distribution for no rational reason other than I like to build everything myself.
> 
> I'd be happy to take this on, but it will take some time as it wouldn't make sense to update the ghc port without updating the haskell_platform port as well. 
> 
> would it make sense to update the various portfiles to be in sync with the official 2011.2 distribution?

Probably but I don't know anything about ghc or haskell other than that they exist in MacPorts and are dependencies of some software I use.

You should probably attempt to confer with the listed maintainer. I believe he had some work already completed on the updates, but is probably too busy with other things to complete them, or perhaps he encountered a problem he didn't know how to solve.