GHC 6.8.2 stable! (Himerge 0.21.9 too!)

As it reads in the topic, excellent news!

We have finally decided to get GHC 6.8.2 stable in our official Gentoo portage tree. Lennart Kolmodin filled a stabilization request yesterday to get this GHC version stable along with many of their existing libraries.

As we all know, since the Glasgow Haskell Compiler went modular, our dev-haskell/ category has increased its size considerably and the maintenance effort too; so, though we have probably got a bit late stabilizing these packages, we have carefully worked with most of them, and they have been already publicly available for anyone willing to test them from our Gentoo-Haskell overlay since many months ago.

This stabilization will greatly reduce the burden for working with Haskell packages in Gentoo now. Users don't need to keyword most of these packages versions by themselves, and a simply emerge command will suffice to get all the glory out of them :-). Therefore we expect and encourage users to test the stabilized packages and report at bugs.gentoo.org any bug found.

With this important stabilization, Himerge version 0.21.9 also got stabilized, which is the latest and most stable release of it. Now the process of installing this program will be smoother since all their dependencies are marked stable too and a simple 'emerge himerge' will make it.

As explained in the bug #230919, these packages are only stabilized for x86/amd64 , more arches to follow.

All the kudos go to the arch teams and everyone who has helped us to test packages and detect bugs during all this time.

Regards and Enjoy!

Himerge 0.20 release

After almost a year since the first Himerge version was released (May, 03, 2007) , the application has reached its version 0.20 as of today , introducing the following important changes for this release (from its Changelog):

1 - The queue operation 'add' is now available through a right-click from the browser version view for each package.

This will allow to move packages easier to any package queue located inside the down-right control panel.

2 - The queue operations 'remove/clear' are now available from each of the
control panel package queue through a right-click.

You only right-click on any package queue , and a popup-menu will let you choose between removing the selected package inside the queue or clear the whole queue.

With these two changes, which are ones of the most noticeable changes in the general feel&look since Himerge was released almost a year ago; it is intended to increase usability and improves the user experience around the different packages queues ; so now you don't have to move the mouse click over the whole window but instead you have the operations at hand for each package in the specific visual context.

3 - A backup of all the system files used by himerge will be created inside
the ~/.himerge/ directory.

This feature will keep those important configuration files used by Himerge saved inside ~/.himerge/. The application will read and copy these files every time you run a Himerge browser instance, so we don't miss any change.

4 - The USE flag browser is highly-improved. A new browser construction
mechanism speeds up the launch of the browser and shows a more organized and
coherent framework, listing only the necessary flags boxes available for a
given entity (a package or the whole system use flags).

In other words , now the integrated Himerge USE Flag browser will *only* show the flags boxes alphabetically ordered for the existing USE flags of a specific package. There won't exist USE flags categories with empty content.

Some code has been refactored for supporting this feature and the USE flag browser speed has greatly improved.

Himerge is an application written entirely in Haskell that it only acts like a front-end and it uses several other applications written in different languages for some operations; nevertheless , some users seem to have problems or not willing to compile many keyworded/masked Haskell packages for it and I have been creating binaries for x86/amd64 for some Himerge versions lately ; you can get the ebuilds from: http://dev.gentoo.org/~araujo/stuff/ebuilds/.

Be aware that these binaries will be usually out-of-dated and they are currently in testing stage (some runtime dependencies could be missing here and there) , so if you receive an error , please try to compile and use the source version of the package instead before reporting.

If you want to know more about Himerge , please visit its official web-site at http://www.haskell.org/himerge. You can also stop by #gentoo-guis@irc.freenode.net where some of us who believe in graphical interfaces inside Gentoo use to idle ;-).

Himerge is a program developed by one-man , which means, one-man ideas too, but comments and bugs reports are welcome , and much more if they come with a patch ;-)

Regards,