[Re-Sending, the mailing list is picky about sender e-mail addresses.] Hi Heinrich, Am Freitag, den 11.05.2012, 10:23 +0200 schrieb Heinrich Apfelmus:
With these principles in mind, imagine my surprise, then, to discover that the "Haskell Platform" on Ubuntu 12.04 includes GHC 7.4.1
http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/haskell-platform
Clearly, this must be a fake Haskell Platform, because the latest real Haskell Platform is still at GHC 7.0.4 at the time of this writing. Unfortunately, my principle 1 is now rendered moot.
the problem with packaging the platform is that distributions have a one-version-per-package policy, so we can not always have exactly the version present in the latest platform, e.g. because other packages require a newer version, or just because the old version is too old and buggy and our users want newer versions. Therefore, we take the liberty to diverge a bit. You can see the current status for Debian on http://people.debian.org/~nomeata/platform.html Furthermore, in the development brach of Debian, unstable, we prepare the next releases and currently package the versions that we expect for the platform 2012.2.0.0. You can see that the version you linked to is such an prerelease by the version number (2012.1.0.0~debian1). In Debian, we would avoid having such a prerelease in a stable release (but might decide that it could still be better than having too old versions of compiler and libraries). I can’t speak for Ubuntu in that regard.
I don't quite know what to do. I understand that there is a need to get the latest GHC into the standard setup, but creating a "fake" Haskell Platform seems like a mistake to me, as it contradicts the use case "complete Haskell beginner" I described above. Not to mention that I'm stuck with the "real" Haskell Platform on Mac OS X and would have to manage separate cabal installations if I want to thoroughly test my package for all compiler versions. Or is it my principles that need to change?
From a distro point of view I can only say: We made policies and decisions that lead to us not being able to provide up-to-date libraries _and_ the latest (or even all) platform versions, so this problem will likely stay around for a while. What we can offer, though, is to package your software. A „complete Haskell beginner“ should maybe use distro-packaged libraries in the first place, precisely because the distribution takes care of these issues for him. Greetings, Joachim -- Joachim "nomeata" Breitner mail@joachim-breitner.de | nomeata@debian.org | GPG: 0x4743206C xmpp: nomeata@joachim-breitner.de | http://www.joachim-breitner.de/