Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development
I forget who mentioned this to me, but I think it's a great idea. Things like VirtualBox and VMWare are pretty easy to install and set up these days. It wouldn't be hard for someone to create a VM image of a Linux system with a complete GHC development environment set up and ready to go. This would have a lot of benefits: * Easy to buy into: just install VirtualBox (or whatever), download the image, register it and away you go. * Would make the barrier to entry much lower for someone who wants to make a small change, e.g. to the docs, or a library. validate and 'darcs send' would Just Work. * Would serve as an example of best-practice in setting up a GHC development environment. The hard part might be optimising the install so that we don't end up with an enormous image file. We'd probably need to find a suitably minimal Linux install, or start from an existing minimal Linux VM image. Anyone feeling keen? Cheers, Simon
On a related note: I have an amazon EC2 machine image* based on Ubuntu
Server edition with the following set up:
- GHC 6.10.3 + locally installed documentation
- cabal install
Which is, IMO, the baseline requirements of a haskell dev environment.
What other packages would be useful?
I'd imagine the setup for a VM image and an a Amazon EC2 image would
have an identical base. Well, maybe the amazon EC2 image should use a
server distro while the vm image a desktop distro?
-Corey O'Connor
* I don't know how to release the machine image such that it's
paramaterized by a public/private key unique to the user. Once I
figure that out I'll make sure it's public.
On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:57 AM, Simon Marlow
I forget who mentioned this to me, but I think it's a great idea.
Things like VirtualBox and VMWare are pretty easy to install and set up these days. It wouldn't be hard for someone to create a VM image of a Linux system with a complete GHC development environment set up and ready to go.
This would have a lot of benefits:
* Easy to buy into: just install VirtualBox (or whatever), download the image, register it and away you go.
* Would make the barrier to entry much lower for someone who wants to make a small change, e.g. to the docs, or a library. validate and 'darcs send' would Just Work.
* Would serve as an example of best-practice in setting up a GHC development environment.
The hard part might be optimising the install so that we don't end up with an enormous image file. We'd probably need to find a suitably minimal Linux install, or start from an existing minimal Linux VM image.
Anyone feeling keen?
Cheers, Simon _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
On Jun 2, 2009, at 1:57 PM, Simon Marlow wrote:
We'd probably need to find a suitably minimal Linux install, or start from an existing minimal Linux VM image.
There is a german article [1] how to combine BusyBox [2] with a linux kernel to get a full (restricted, but small) linux system. Maybe this helps reducing the image size. There are english articles [3] on the web too. Cheers, Sebastian [1]: http://www.heise.de/ct/inhalt/2009/12/156/ [2]: http://www.busybox.net/about.html [3]: http://www.google.com/search?q=building+tiny+linux+systems+with+busybox -- Underestimating the novelty of the future is a time-honored tradition. (D.G.)
participants (3)
-
Corey O'Connor -
Sebastian Fischer -
Simon Marlow