I did actually get into some (not serious) trouble running this "install them all and let god sort them out" approach. There were complaints about some haskell gtk packages which hung during the apt-get command, which I had to end with ctrl-c. Thereafter, these packages would cause error messages whenever I used apt (even for non haskell purposes). I considered this not too too serious since apt continued to install the stuff I needed, but the errors were annoying. I was able to back my package repository into a non-error-printing state by following the instructions in the "If It Hangs" section (which I just wrote) at http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Repairing_apt-get_database Basically use apt-get --autoclean apt-get autoremove and then apt-get --purge remove package for every package causing problems The errors then stopped. The above script did leave with a lot of haskell stuff installed from packages, which is convenient, but I will refine it so it completes without errors, time allowing. 2007/4/5, Thomas Hartman :

...

and in more detail in my other post linked above.

I meant, linked below.

2007/4/5, Thomas Hartman :

...

In the spirit of...

I hate package chasing, cabal doesn't do this automatically (yet), and hard disk space is cheap...

Here is a script to just hit the deb/ubuntu repos and install as much haskell-loooking stuff as possible.

If you're going to do this, I would recommend pulling at least from the feisty repo, as described in pupeno's blog, and in more detail in my other post linked above.

Basically, this installs all ghc6* packages, with ad-hoc blocking of packages that cause aptitude to complain.

The basic approach seems sound though. If it gets stuck at some point, I'll just add the offending package to the filter list. (I suspect there's a more intelligent way to do this if you know debian package management better than I do.)

The script below has been cranking away for a pretty long time now -- so not only may your mileage vary, mine isnt' even yet.

I also wouldn't recommend doing this on a production server. (When/if I hose my system, I can reload a virgin ubuntu in under five minutes using my linode control panel.)

*********

apt-cache search libghc6 | ghc -e 'interact $ unlines . map (\l -> head $ words l ) . lines' \ | grep -ivE \(ghc6-hopengl\|libghc6-c2hs-dev\) \ | xargs apt-get -y install

2007/3/16, Chad Scherrer :

...

Brian,

I had this exact problem, and I found this approach to work wonderfully:

http://pupeno.com/2006/12/17/unstable-packages-on-ubuntu/

Chad _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

On 05/04/07, Thomas Hartman wrote:

In the spirit of...

I hate package chasing, cabal doesn't do this automatically (yet), and hard disk space is cheap...

Agreed. As much as I like the rest of Ubuntu I'm beginning to dislike binary packages after only a week away from Gentoo ;-) Still, at least they install quicker! Are there recommended ways of setting up current development systems? I'm the only person on this machine, so having system-wide packages isn't much of an issue. Would I be better just building all my own from tarball rather than hoping Feisty stays up to date? Cheers, D.