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

magnus:

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.

And good integration will only serve to increase the number of users, and build further critical mass. It has to start somewhere people! -- Don