copilot-bluespec: Tests failing on hackage

[ivanperez-keera]

The tests of copilot-bluespec fail on hackage: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/copilot-bluespec-4.5/reports/1

Do we know why? Is this due to a dependency on a tool not available on hackage?

[ivanperez-keera]

Tagging @RyanGlScott for awareness.

[RyanGlScott]

The copilot-bluespec tests require bsc (the Bluespec compiler) to be available so that it can compile and simulate the generated Bluespec code.

[ivanperez-keera]

Is this something we can add as a tool dependency in the cabal package? Or would we need to request that it be on hackage for these tests to pass?

[RyanGlScott]

No, not really—cabal has no knowledge of the bsc tool.

If having the tests fail on Hackage is a concern, then we could mark the test suite as non-buildable by default.

[ivanperez-keera]

Isn't bluespec written in Haskell? If we asked the Bluespec team to put it on hackage, would we be able to depend on it?

[RyanGlScott]

bsc is indeed written in Haskell, but my understanding is that the bsc build system is somewhat non-trivial. For starters, they invoke ghc directly on .hs files instead of using .cabal. I think getting things into a state where it could be put into a .cabal file and uploaded to Hackage would take some effort. (See also B-Lang-org/bsc#546, which requests that specific parts of bsc that language-bluespec makes use of be split into individual libraries.)

[ivanperez-keera]

Could and should we ask the hackage team to make bsc available on hackage?

[RyanGlScott]

We could certainly request this, per the advice in haskell/hackage-server#1414 (comment). I held off on doing so up until this point since I was awaiting an answer to my question here, but I never received a response. At this point, it would likely be more direct just to open an issue on https://github.com/haskell-infra/hackage-doc-builder-config and see what happens.

[RyanGlScott]

I've converted this discussion into an issue at #673.