On Fri, 14 Oct 2016 at 16:55:25 -0400, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Am Freitag, den 14.10.2016, 19:44 +0200 schrieb Andrew Shadura:
> > It was previously based on pandoc, and a pandoc backend will be
> > available again soon, but the dependency tree with a hard pandoc
> > dependency was just too deep.
>
> pandoc (the binary package) seems to have a reasonable set of
> dependencies:
> Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libffi6 (>= 3.0.4), libgmp10, liblua5.1-0,
> libluajit-5.1-2, libpcre3, libyaml-0-2, zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.4), pandoc-
> data (>= 1.17.2~dfsg-1), pandoc-data (<< 1.17.2~dfsg-1.~)
> What tree are you referring to?
The recursive build-dependencies for large Haskell programs like pandoc
are rather huge. It doesn't show in binary dependencies because Haskell
programs are effectively statically-linked.
It isn't a massive problem for Debian (although the release team does
have to have special tools to deal with rebuilding Haskell and Ocaml
packages when necessary), but in smaller distributions (whether Debian
derivatives or not) it can be a significant issue. In particular,
one of the tools Hotdoc provides an alternative to is GNOME's gtk-doc,
and making metabuild systems like jhbuild and gnome-continuous build
all the dependencies of Pandoc doesn't seem very appealing.
S
