Shit's discontinued.

Dancer

Dancer is the declarative package manager for Compass Linux. It handles package resolution, building, conflict solving, and incremental updates. Everything is configured in Haskell.

Features

• Declarative package definitions: Write packages in Haskell with full type safety.
• Dependency resolution: Automatically resolves and fetches transitive dependencies.
• Conflict detection: Warns about incompatible package combinations (e.g., GNU tools + musl libc).
• Incremental builds: Only rebuild packages that have changed.
• Full rebuilds: Cold rebuild the entire system with --from-scratch.
• Generations: Automatically creates snapshots for easy rollback.
• USE flags: Fine-grained control over package features.
• Build environment: Respects MAKEFLAGS, CFLAGS, and other build variables from your config.

Building Dancer

Requirements

• GHC 9.6+
• Stack
• Haskell libraries (automatically fetched by Stack)

Build

cd dancer
stack build

Usage

Basic Commands

Full system rebuild from scratch

dancer rebuild --from-scratch

Incremental rebuild

dancer rebuild

Fetch latest package definitions

dancer fetch

Rebuild user homes

dancer home rebuild

Architecture

Modules

• Dancer.Types: Core data types (Package, SystemConfig, LibC, etc.)
• Dancer.CLI: Command-line interface and argument parsing.
• Dancer.Config: Loading and validating Haskell config files.
• Dancer.Build: Dependency resolution, conflict checking, and build orchestration.
• Dancer.Logging: Consistent logging utilities.

Build Flow

1. Parse CLI arguments
2. Load /etc/dancer/system.hs config
3. Resolve package dependencies
4. Check for conflicts
5. Build each package in order
6. Create a new generation for rollback
7. Print summary

Generations

Dancer automatically creates a new "generation" after each successful rebuild. These are snapshots of your system that you can rollback to.

Generations are stored in /var/lib/dancer/generations/.

Development

To add a new command:

1. Add a handler in Dancer.CLI
2. Add the pattern match to runCLI
3. Implement the logic

To modify the build process:

1. Edit Dancer.Build
2. Update the logging calls to match the style
3. Test with stack build && stack exec dancer -- <command>