Use a Hackage overlay for reflex

[philderbeast]

Because few people use ghcjs and reflex with cabal some important packages (ghcjs-base, reflex, reflex-dom) are not on Hackage, or only with old versions. You can point cabal to local checkouts using a cabal.project file or even directly to the git repositories. But it is simpler to just use a Hackage overlay that I created with these three packages, until they are uploaded to Hackage.

@nomeata describes how to use ghcjs and reflex with cabal

https://hackage-ghcjs-overlay.nomeata.de/

This could be a good way to get the front end working again. Quite some time ago an upgrade of nix locally on osx broke nix-build and try-reflex. Since then I've been unable to build with nix.

[philderbeast]

The ppas from @hvr and a travis script using hackage overlays;

https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc
https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghcjs
https://travis-ci.org/nomeata/kaleidogen/jobs/412194092/config

[hvr]

My PPA doesn't help much w/ building natively on OSX though :-)

[philderbeast]

Thanks @hvr, I may attempt to use the PPA you provide on WSL/ubuntu with the hackage overlay from @nomeata.

On WSL/ubuntu, I have got both nix and reflex-platform working. The trick I needed to get nix installed there is setting use-sqlite-wal = false in /etc/nix/nix.conf as described in NixOS/nix#1203. I have also managed to find the problem with the broken nix install on mac, the symlinks for overlays I had under ~/.config/nixpkgs/ were bad.

I have some repair work to do getting the nix build of flare-timing packages going again and bringing the viewer, a reflex-frp web app, up to date with the rest of the project. That done, I'll be ready to work on this issue. I'd like to be able to build the viewer in two ways, with try-reflex and with cabal, ghcjs and reflex using those hackage overlays.

[philderbeast]

This issue became a place for reviving the reflex-frp front end. That's going again and merged to master. I'll keep this issue number now for its intended purpose.