diff --git a/content/alpine-pkgs.md b/content/alpine-pkgs.md index 07d4cbc..87a9824 100644 --- a/content/alpine-pkgs.md +++ b/content/alpine-pkgs.md @@ -200,6 +200,27 @@ how far I could push it, as well as maybe, sometimes, create actual games. Inform is currently proprietary, although its creator says he wants to make it open-source. Until then, it will go on a private repo... +### pandoc-bin + +Alpine's maintainers want packages to be compiled from source, particularly +because they mostly always need to be compiled from source to handle musl or +be truly lightweight. Pandoc will no longer be available in the next Alpine +release (3.15), because the Haskell maintainers do not accept upstream patches +for musl compatibility and maintaining the `ghc` compiler has been a pain. +`ghc` is blocking the next release and no packages other than Pandoc and some +unmaintained or rarely used dependencies are depending on it, so the decision +was made to remove it entirely. + +Pandoc provides on their [GitHub releases](https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/releases) +some amd64 and arm64 binaries that are statically-linked, meaning they do not +depend on neither `musl` nor `glibc`. The binaries are on the heavy side, but +they seem to run perfectly well on Alpine. + +I do not have the knowledge to help with fixing `ghc`, and after a thorough +review of a large amount of Markdown parsers, only Pandoc fits my requirements. +To avoid having to rewrite every single of my websites in another Markdown +dialect or in pure HTML, I will just package pandoc's binary in a private repo. + ### bad ideas A discussion on IRC led to some ideas for terrible packages that we could put