[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Best Linux for Haskell?

Martin DeMello wrote:

On 11/6/07, Maurí­cio wrote:

...

Maybe (and only maybe), before choosing a distribution, you should choose a package system, since that's what you are going to use to install software. Look for RPM and APT, and see what you think. With my package system (I don't wanna give you any prejudice, so I won't tell you it's APT), I can get upgrades easily. But that's because I know how to use it. There are also other options beside RPM and APT.

Gentoo's portage (inspired by FreeBSD's ports) is the best linux packaging system I've come across, but I wouldn't recommend Gentoo itself as a first distro. It makes a brilliant second one, though.

Even better, at least in theory, is Nix (http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html). Unfortunately it is not yet mature. And of course nobody uses it (yet ;-) BTW, Nix is based on a purely functional package description language which is also maximally lazy, meaning that syntactically equal terms are /always/ shared and only evaluated once. (And yes, it is of course turing complete.) Cheers Ben