Ketil Malde wrote:
I've had an interested user, who tried to get one of my programs to run on a Debian machine - running Debian Etch, released a couple of months ago.
Your user is pretty much at the pessimal point in the release cycle. Etch is more than a year old, and lenny (the next release) is in pre-release freeze. None of which helps your users, of course. Perhaps things will improve once lenny is out. [non-working versions snipped]
Granted, not all of this is our fault, but it won't help users to start charging the windmills of Debian conservativism. We really need to make this process smoother, and ideally, provide debs for Etch backports.
Another option is to try installing the version from lenny (6.8.2). This may or may not pull in a wack of dependencies, but is not difficult to try out [1].
I'm not sure how to go about any of this, beyond debianizing my own packages. But that's why I'm telling you. :-)
There was some discussion on the list recently about a tool to semi-automatically debianize haskell packages. Perhaps this is of interest to you. There is also a debian-haskell [2] list, which might be relevant. David [1]: http://wiki.debian.org/AptPinning [2]: currently at http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/debian-haskell but possible moving.