[tahoe-dev] Removing the dependency on GHC

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Wednesday, 2010-03-03, at 1:40 , Ludovic Courtès wrote:

> We’ve been looking at running Tahoe-LAFS on NixOS GNU/Linux on ARM.

Cool! A lot of people seem to be interested in running Tahoe-LAFS on  
little ARM CPUs nowadays.

> However, Tahoe requires ‘darcsver’, which needs Darcs, which needs  
> GHC,

These are needed only for one specific thing: to generate a version  
number based on revision control history and write that version  
number down into src/allmydata/_version.py. When we distribute  
tarballs (http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe-lafs/tarballs/?C=M;O=D )  
we include that src/allmydata/_version.py in the tarball so that  
people building from that tarball do not require darcs. Darcsver  
automatically falls back to using the pre-generated _version.py file  
if it can't execute darcs when it runs.

So, perhaps the NixOS packaging could include a pre-generated  
_version.py file and remove the dependency on darcs.

Regards,

Zooko