* Richard Uhtenwoldt
http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Software/Haskell/debian/
Yes, Brent's packages supersede mine. The archive is stale.
On my system, /usr/bin/ghc-pkg is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/ghc-pkg which is a symlink to /usr/lib/ghc-5.02.2/bin/ghc-pkg which is a symlink to ghc-pkg-5.02.2
(Yes, I do that many symlinks is stupid.)
*wearing the Debian GHC maintainer's hat*
Well, if you care you could ask yourself why I did it like this.
Looking into /etc/alternatives/, there are seemingly many other
packages doing the same thing. The update-alternatives(8) man page is
a good starting place, too.
In short:
* to be able to have ghc4 and ghc5 (two different packages, explicit
decision by me back then) coexist friendly on one system.
* to give admins an easy choice about the site-wide default
compiler.
* Malcolm Wallace
It looks as though the debian installation of ghc is non-standard.
Which standard? The upstream tarball installs to /usr/local by default or whereever I want to, IIRC.
All of ghc-5.02.2, ghci-5.02.2, and ghc-pkg-5.02.2, should exist in addition to ghc, ghci, and ghc-pkg.
They do exist: [215]% dpkg -L ghc5|grep 'bin/.*5.04' /usr/lib/ghc-5.04.2/bin/ghc-pkg-5.04.2 /usr/lib/ghc-5.04.2/bin/ghc-5.04.2 /usr/lib/ghc-5.04.2/bin/ghci-5.04.2 To switch between ghc4 and ghc5: export PATH=/usr/lib/ghc-$VERSION/bin:$PATH Easy setup, all programs (including the non-version-in-name ones) always consistantly fitting together. Least maintenance effort. No shared/overwritten files. Works for me since ~1999.
The idea is that you can have several versions of ghc installed simultaneously, and refer to the version number explicitly to select any non-default one.
It's not possible to install more than one version of a single Debian package. Whether this is a good thing or not may be arguable, but it's the status quo. If someone wants different versions of the same software installed, it's a special need, and so s/he needs to install them locally to ~/, or some other place. Creating a .deb with a different name is also an option. I try to keep it relatively easy, even. I think only two files need trivial changes, but I haven't tried this in a long time. I do accept patches and am responsive to questions usually, though. HTH, HAND :) Michael (not subscribed, please honor the M-F-T header)