Re: [Haskell-cafe] PRE-ANNOUNCE: cabal-debian (automatically debianize cabal packages)

Hi, Am Freitag, den 22.08.2008, 10:13 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:32 AM, David Bremner wrote:

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At Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:52:00 -0400 (EDT), Christopher Lane Hinson wrote:

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I'm not a DD, but I think uploading ~500 hackage packages to debian would be a bit of a no-no. Debian packages are expected to have active maintainers both upstream and on the debian side, and to build without a hitch on ten different architectures, or they don't make it into stable and the DD responsible gets whined at.

Fundamentally I think Lane is correct, but it is worth noting that the debian perl team maintains 938 CPAN modules. The effort involved is not trivial, but the number of consistently active people involved is not so huge (maybe 5 core people, and lots of people who are interested in one or two packages).

Now, there are only 1217 registered installs of ghc6 on debian, compared to 74000+ perl installs (essentially everyone installs perl I guess), so it is not clear that the critical mass exists for a debian perl style team.

To add to this I suspect that there are more people involved in the perl team than there even are DDs with ghc6 installed, but maybe I'm just being negative. Maybe the time is ripe for a Debian haskell team? I know the idea has been floated before on the Debian Haskell list but I don't think it's ever gained any momentum.

I had it floated to the debian-haskell mailing list once, but as you said, there were not much responses. The Debian Perl Group (which was started by me some years ago) is indeed a good example for good library package maintenance. What made it successful was, in my opinion, people with constant devotion (that was not me :-)) and a faible for developing tools for the team. Have a look at http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi and you see how it was possible to maintain this number of packages with just a few people. Incidentally, a few days ago Ian Lynagh was asking if someone wants to take over his haskell packages, so if there were a group to be formed, it could start with all the base packages. OTOH, this leaves the question open of who will maintain the compiler itself. Of course, this is a totally different thing than maintaining cabalized libraries and so far, no one has stepped up to give it a shot. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner Debian Developer nomeata@debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C JID: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata