bug#47335: Hide GHC not used for building Was: xmonad fails to recompile on guix system

[zimoun]

Hi,

On Wed, 15 Sept 2021 at 09:43, Lars-Dominik Braun <lars@6xq.net> wrote:

> > I'd be very much in favor of the latter, or maybe rename it to ghc-next.
> > I have some profiles ghc pinned to a version and upgrading those is
> > always a mess because Guix tries to build the old version from source
> > instead of using the next version.
>
> I renamed ghc@8.8 to ghc-next in commit
> 39b43d0d0428474a1d0bf58779d0135163b9c6e3.

Well, I am late to the party and probably out of point but I think
this '-next' is not something we should introduce and generalize.
Well, who knows if these '-next' will be the real next. ;-)   My
comment is also about guile-next, emacs-next and python-next.  Noting
that gcc-toolchain does not have a '-next'; packages are built using
7.5.0 but "guix install gcc-toolchain" will install 11.2.0 and then it
could lead to the same issue as the one reported with GHC, I guess.

Instead of this '-next' trick, we should find a better mechanism where
"guix install ghc" would install the default GHC used by the Haskell
build-system.  Idem for the others guile-next, python-next etc..  And
any other version should be installed using  the explicit mention,
i.e., "guix install ghc@8.8", IMHO.

Cheers,
simon