Bug 746325

For Fedora 15, this is a regression in an update, introduced by FEDORA-2011-13443.

But Fedora 16 and Rawhide are affected, too.

ghc-rpm-macros changed a while ago. The commit is here[1], but things could change back again I suppose. Other packaging changes happened as well since then. There's also a ghc bug[2] for generating DWARF debugging, but it's targeted at 7.4.1 which is almost certainly "not soon".

[1]http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=ghc-rpm-macros.git;a=commit;h=1bc67af711426c41245fc27a735aca5be2244617
[2]http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3693

Prof packages have always required devel packages:
there is no dependency regression wrt to profiling with this change.

Note also that profiling is different to debugging.
GHC profiling can give you information about time and space
usage of a program (built with profiling), which is normally
related to performance analysis not debugging.
Note also that programs have to be rebuilt explicitly
completely with profiling enabled in order
to get profiling information, so this is not that cheap.

The main difference now is that we get profiling
libraries installed with devel packages.  This change
was introduced to F16 in May 2011 to reduce the large number
of subpackages and simply build dependencies and packaging,
so I see this as a step forward.  But if you have more
concrete concerns I would like to hear them.  You may also
want to subscribe to the haskell-devel list if you wish
to follow Fedora Haskell development more closely.
In future I will try to cc announcements of large
Haskell packaging changes also to devel list.
Noone on the haskell-devel list has complained to
date anyway yet about this change.

The ghc-rpm-macros change has already been in F15
for quite a while and all new updates built for F15
don't have prof subpackages either (the same is also
true for F14).  Since F16 has been without prof subpackages
now for 5 months and it seems stable and working well
I thought it was about time also to push ghc with merged
prof subpackages to F15.

I hope this explains the background a bit.

From https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2011-13443

  kkofler - 2011-10-15 04:45:42 (karma 0)
             [..] The -xc option, which provides backtraces for
             exceptions, requires binaries built for profiling,
             i.e. exactly what the -prof subpackages contain.

             kkofler - 2011-10-15 04:46:12 (karma 0)
             (Now if -prof always required -devel, that was always
             broken.)

Ok, I see I am not familiar with this use case.

But I assume you are building with -package or --make
for this which requires libraries' .conf files which are provided
by the devel subpackages: I think what you want is
an upstream RFE to support dyn, static and prof
libraries separately.  /usr/bin/ghc and ghc-pkg
doesn't really known about the different flavours
of libraries, as far as they are concerned
a library is either installed or not.
I believe there is an upstream bug/rfe/todo
to separate them out but not sure if anyone is
working on this presently.

I don't think ghc does what you want yet though
I am happy to be proven wrong.