Turn no-exe on by default

[alerque]

I've just run into an upgrade to a haskell program (pandoc) requiring a new version on this. The latest version seems to have introduced some new binaries. Of course these conflict with existing binaries of the same name from the popular remarshal project which also offers other formats.

I see there is a no-exe flag but it is disabled causing upstream packages to have this start showing up without much warning and with no resolution. I need the features remarshal offers and my scripts expect it's command line syntax. I only need the haskel library part of this as a dependency.

Further I don't see what sense it makes to package these together. Could the x2y binaries not just as well be packaged separately? What happens when the haskell-json package introduces a json2yaml binary too? Why does having it in this package make any more sense? At the very least something unique in the binary names would be appreciated.

[snoyberg]

Let me guess: you're building with cabal and the executables are ending up in ~/.cabal/bin?

[alerque]

No. I'm actually using the Arch Linux package in the haskell-core repository and the package has file conflicts with remarshal because both put things in /usr/bin. I suppose this might not even be the right place to file this, I need to find who is choosing packaging options or those builds.

[snoyberg]

That's probably the correct place, standard Haskell build tooling does not specify installing executables into any global location.

[ghost]

Might help - https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/haskell-yaml/ , https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Haskell_package_guidelines sounds like the default is to bundle libraries and exes together in one Arch package. Other distros might have more complex default policies that Arch Haskell package maintainers could model their policy after?

I would close the issue here and reopen if you hit a roadblock with Arch maintainers? (I am just an outsider observer, I do not maintain this package.)

[sol]

Personally, I would be in favor of either defaulting the no-exe flag to True or removing the executables from the package.

[snoyberg]

I agree, I'll make that change shortly.