On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 06:04:12PM -0400, dhw@thedance.net wrote:
Background: I'm an experienced Linuxer, but not experienced with the Debian package-management tools. I recently decided it was time to renew my acquaintance with Haskell, which began before the do-notation, with Hugs. Seeing the warnings on the ghc website, I decided to install a Linux distribution with a strongly checked package system. I chose Knoppix-7.2.0 i386 (the latest, dated mid-2013), which installed with few problems (now fixed). It claimed to be based on wheezy, the stable branch. Even though the version of haskell-platform in wheezy/stable was from mid-2012, I presumed it would be debugged by now - after all, that's what "stable" is supposed to mean. So I hooked it up to the net, and entered
apt-get install haskell-platform
I have a VPS which is can only run old Ubuntu LTS which has GHC 7.4.1 and associated out of date libraries. So I install GHC from the binary tarball (to /usr/local) and then use cabal for any extra libraries I need. No apt-get, no Haskell Platform. If you're just getting back into Haskell you may find that 'apt-get install ghc' or the tarball is all you need, the platform may be overkill.