@fosskers: I'd recommend placing 'ghc' as an optional dependency if at all. From what I can tell when stack is installed normally before hand (i.e. you already have developed with haskell / using stack) the --system-ghc line will always work, even if you don't actually have a system ghc (which ghc supplies). That is, to my understanding having 'ghc' as a makedepends right now will force the installation of the ghc package, which you may not have despite having stack (all arch haskell packages are dynamically compiled for example, so in my case I use stack-static instead of 'ghc'), even if it may not be needed.
In the end stack downloading ghc or 'ghc' downloading ghc, both will download it if it isn't there, only difference being stack's download isn't as obviously seen as a package by pacman, so maybe including a print out saying how to remove that downloaded data by stack if you don't want to just remove the package altogether.
tl;dr: Having ghc as a hard dependency means it will be installed erroneously in setups where you already had stack installed, and worryingly may or may not make aura depend on dynamic libraries even if the user is using stack-static or similar tools to avoid that specific issue.
Pinned Comments
fosskers commented on 2020-02-02 02:43 (UTC) (edited on 2020-05-27 18:08 (UTC) by fosskers)
If you'd rather not deal with Haskell dependencies, a pre-built binary is available in the
aura-binpackage .