On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:13:04 -0500

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"Jeff" == Jeff Wheeler wrote:

Jeff> A bunch of stuff is packaged by dons for Arch; you can see a lot Jeff> of links to the Arch packages on Hackage. It might be worth Jeff> looking into. +1 for Arch. Sincerely, Gour -- Gour | Hlapicina, Croatia | GPG key: F96FF5F6 ----------------------------------------------------------------

On 28/03/10 08:50, Gour wrote:

On Sat, 27 Mar 2010 23:13:04 -0500

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> "Jeff" == Jeff Wheeler wrote:

Jeff> A bunch of stuff is packaged by dons for Arch; you can see a lot Jeff> of links to the Arch packages on Hackage. It might be worth Jeff> looking into.

+1 for Arch.

Add one more for Arch. I have to say it looks like Debian has gotten their act together somewhat when it comes to Haskel development. Many of the reasons for my deserting Debian seem have been taken care of. /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe

On 28/03/10 12:53, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 28.03.2010, 09:04 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:

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I have to say it looks like Debian has gotten their act together somewhat when it comes to Haskel development. Many of the reasons for my deserting Debian seem have been taken care of.

so, what is missing for you to come back :-)

Well, maybe I should qualify that a bit. There were a few issues with Haskell in Debian in the past. Most noticeably the lack of packages in the standard repos. This seems to have been addressed. The other thing, that bit me at the time, and witch really pushed me over the edge was the lack of speed in adopting new upstream versions of ghc and some of the very basic packages. That Debian has started picking up more packages is noticeable in Hackage. However, an increase in speed wouldn't really be noticeable to a non-Debian user. So you might have improved considerably in that area too... I just wouldn't know :-) /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 4:53 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:

Hi,

Am Sonntag, den 28.03.2010, 09:04 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:

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I have to say it looks like Debian has gotten their act together somewhat when it comes to Haskel development. Many of the reasons for my deserting Debian seem have been taken care of.

so, what is missing for you to come back :-)

The reason I started telling everyone to avoid GHC in apt was the way it was packaged. Casual Haskell users would install GHC but get something like 1/10th of the libraries GHC installs when you do a source install and none of the profiled libraries. Everything seems fine and working. A few days later, this casual user tries to build something and cannot find the libraries they need. Usually they would struggle to find them and when when they did find out where to get them the answer was often, "It should have come with ghc". They're baffled. If they are lucky they figure out which apt package to install. Now fast forward a few weeks. This casual user is now trying to profile something, oh wait, some problem again. If it had been an install from the ghc source then only additional packages on hackage would need to be hunted down and installed. Basically, it was a monumental headache for casual users to hunt down the full package list to reconstruct what you'd get from the source install. So, at some point, I just started telling all my friends to avoid the ghc in apt and go straight for the tarballs from GHC HQ. This advice seemed to save a lot of head scratching later. To me, until there is one obvious package to install to get the same set of files as a normal ghc install I will continue to discourage people from getting ghc from apt :) I've heard virtual packages could be used to fix the problem. That would be nice as long as the virtual package is easy to find and the name tips people off that it's the GHC they really want. I hope you find my feedback useful :) Jason PS It's been several years since I checked on GHC in debian, maybe my concerns have already been addressed.

Ivan Miljenovic wrote:

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[..] now trying to profile something, oh wait, some problem again.

Agreed, if Debian didn't include the profiling libraries with GHC (though is this due to how Debian does packages?).

The haskell packages for Debian (I am one) have decided to stick to a pattern where if an upstream Haskell library is called 'foo' then: - The source code package will be called haskell-foo. - The library will be called libghc6-foo-dev. - The profiling version will be called libghc6-foo-prof - The documentation will be called libghc6-foo-doc. There might still be a small number of packages doing a variation on the above (especially for the source and doc packages).

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To me, until there is one obvious package to install to get the same set of files as a normal ghc install I will continue to discourage people from getting ghc from apt :)

Unless it still doesn't provide profiling libraries, the extralibs problem is no more. There is, however, the Haskell Platform (which Debian seems to have almost had complete support for until the new one came out; now they've got to start again... >_> ).

Actually not quite correct. Debian does not strictly follow the Haskell Platform, mainly because some libraries in Debian were already at a later version when the first platform was released. The current situation can be seen here: http://wiki.debian.org/Haskell/Platform However, installing the Debian haskell-platform package should get close enough to the official Haskell Platform for most users not to notice. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

Ivan Miljenovic wrote:

On 30 March 2010 14:33, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:

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The haskell packages for Debian (I am one)

You are a Haskell _package_? :p

s/packages/packagers/ Although I speak for me, not the group.

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 - The source code package will be called haskell-foo.

Is this an actual installable package (so you're installing the actual source code?) ?

The command: apt-get source haskell-foo will grab the haskell-foo source package bundle which includes the original source tarball, a diff.gz that gets applied to that tarball to make it into a debian package and a crypto signed file with md5 and sha1 signatures of the previous two files. It will then check the signatures and if they are ok, extract the original tarball and apply the diff.

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Debian does not strictly follow the Haskell Platform, mainly because some libraries in Debian were already at a later version when the first platform was released.

Hence the "almost complete": you can't say to have Platform support unless you have all of those exact packages.

Debian doesn't have 'The Haskell Platform', it has a package named haskell-platform which conforms as closely as is reasonably possible to the former. For instance, if the Platform specifies Foo-1.0 and that has a security vulnerability but Foo-1.1 doesn't, then Debian is highly likely to ship Foo-1.1 instead. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

Ketil Malde writes:

I think people who are too lazy to bother to find out how their distribution works, should avoid any distribution.

% apt-cache search foo % sudo apt-get install libghc6-foo\*

Agreed (to the extent that someone who can't be bothered figuring out an "advanced" distribution like Gentoo or LFS should try a "simpler" one first like Ubuntu before completely giving up).

Erik de Castro Lopo writes:

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Debian doesn't have 'The Haskell Platform', it has a package named haskell-platform

Ubuntu (10.4) doesn't seem to? Is this an omission?

Hasn't been ported yet IIRC. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com

Hi Jason and other, thanks for the suggestions, the Debian Haskell Team is eager to learn why people do or don’t use the packaged libraries. Am Dienstag, den 30.03.2010, 14:01 +1100 schrieb Ivan Miljenovic:

On 30 March 2010 13:55, Jason Dagit wrote:

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[..] now trying to profile something, oh wait, some problem again.

Agreed, if Debian didn't include the profiling libraries with GHC (though is this due to how Debian does packages?).

The profiling data is put in -prof packages, i.e. ghc-prof, libghc6-network-prof etc. Indeed, there is no easy way to tell the package system: Whenever I install a Haskell -dev package, please install the -prof package as well. It has been proposed to just drop the -prof packages and include it in the -dev package, as disk space is cheap. But ghc6-prof does weigh 254M, and not everybody who wants to modify his xmonad config wants to install that.

Unless it still doesn't provide profiling libraries, the extralibs problem is no more. There is, however, the Haskell Platform (which Debian seems to have almost had complete support for until the new one came out; now they've got to start again... >_> ).

No big deal this time, only minor version bumps and then rebuilding all depending libraries. Maybe we will do this with ghc6-6.12.2, maybe before. 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

Mathijs Kwik wrote:

As a developer in 3 languages (ruby & java professionally, haskell as hobby) I must say I really prefer just managing this manually, separate from the package manager.

I'm running ubuntu LTS (8.04) on production servers.

But this would mean that an environment for a language would also be somewhat frozen for at least 2 years, which isn't very useful. When 10.04 gets out with ghc 6.12.1, it will still mean that's the only thing available until 2012, or I need to upgrade the entire OS every 6 months.

Not necessarily. I am faced with a similar problem, having over 700 production client machines (administered remotely) in the field running the 8.04 LTS release. Because we use Debian packaging as the only sane way to manage binary distribution to that number of machines, we manage our own repository which is basically a validated version of 8.04, plus validated backports, plus our own packages. Furthermore, all of our own packages are built on an autobuilder to ensure that what is in revision control will actually build from source. The autobuilders all start off with a nearly bare install in a chroot, then install the build dependencies and finally build the package. In order for this to work for our one haskell package, I backported ghc-6.10.4 and a bunch of haskell libraries from Debian Testing so that this one package can be built in the autobuilder. I have also been hearing rumours that the next LTS release 10.04 will be more of a rolling release, where more recent versions of things will be available by enabling backports. <snip>

This might not be a solution for you, it really depends on your needs, but for me, I found it's often useful to control the exact environment an application needs and it gives developers the freedom to run whatever OS they like, which is a huge benefit if you use contractors or if devs want to work from home.

I think I found a solution with the same goals as your's, but with a different implementation. Since your machine count is smaller than mine, your scheme probably works better for your situation. For my larger machine count, I would not be happy to trade my scheme for yours :-). Cheers, Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

2010/03/28 Ertugrul Soeylemez

However, as always there is a catch.  Gentoo is a source distribution, which means that you compile the entire system from scratch.  On modern computers this is quite fast, but sometimes it can hammer on your patience.

To be fair, Gentoo has a well thought out system for bundling up an installed build and creating a binary package for installation on other nodes. -- Jason Dusek