Hi, Full disclosure: see my email address. On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 09:34:00AM -0430, Ernesto Hernández-Novich wrote:
On Wed, 2010-07-28 at 15:57 +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:Hi all, Was someone doing a comparison between versions of haskell packages on Ubuntu vs Debian?
I am disappinted to see this come up on debian-haskell, where I'd expect people to understand the difference between Ubuntu releases and the various Debian ones.
My completely unscientific comparison was based on my students' grievances during the last three-month course on Advanced Functional Programming. Out of sixteen students working with Haskell, only two had no problems at all with libraries: those using Squeeze/Sid. The rest were using Ubuntu's latest and latest-1 and they were forced to cabal install either missing or outdated libraries.
Squeeze (testing) and sid are both rolling releases. Ubuntu releases are not.
The problem is that you are expecting libraries to be the latest version as on Hackage. This is not a fair expectation when you look at the Ubuntu development model. If you want this then either use sid or another rolling release distribution such as Arch or Gentoo.
There was also a perceived difference both in size/speed of compilation on identical machines while using Ubuntu's ghc (felt slower, produced bigger executables) vs. Debian's.
I doubt this. The exact same GHC packages have been built on D and U for a while now. Rigorous testing is always welcome.
I don't follow Ubuntu and don't have any interest in doing so, but most of my students tend to use it and always come up asking why doesn't $someDevLibrary work/install on Ubuntu, and it appears to me that development packages aren't enough nor as up to date as Debian's. And this has been a consistent scenario for the past year and a half or so, not only with Haskell, but also Perl and Ruby (students know better than to ask me for advice on Python or Java :-).
When Ubuntu freezes, and in some cases after this, packages are copied directly from Debian.
If you want to make a fair comparison, please ask your students to use Debian stable. Or not update their Squeeze systems any more.
Thanks. Iain
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature