Re: Ubuntu versions vs Debian versions?
Iain Lane wrote:
> 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.
<snip>
> Squeeze (testing) and sid are both rolling releases. Ubuntu releases are
> not.
Agreed, but regardless of rolling vs stable releases, if someone were
to say:
"For any kind of serious Haskell development, it is safer to
pick a Linux distribution with a rolling release schedule rather
than one with periodic stable releases."
then they have pretty much hit the mark. Comapring rolling releases
verses periodic stable releases, I find the many small glitches
pretty evenly spread out across the year to be less painful than
Ubuntu's twice a year up-heaval where I get all this small gitches
bundled up together.
As someone who uses Ubuntu at work almost exclusively for development,
a small portion of it in Haskell, I find Ubuntu painful to work with
in comparison to my personal Debian Testing laptop. On Ubuntu I find
myself adding Debian Testing deb-src lines to my soruces.list file and
compiling Haskell .deb packages from source. As someone who is part
of the Debian Haskell group, this not that painful. I've been creating
Debian packages for years.
However, for people who are new to Ubuntu and/or new to Haskell on
Ubuntu the current situation makes Ubuntu and Haskell look bad.
I also don't think cabal-install is a good option either. In my
experience mixing cabal-installed packages with debs can result
in all sorts of weird things (and not always easy to debug) happening
at some later date.
> If you want to make a fair comparison, please ask your students to use
> Debian stable. Or not update their Squeeze systems any more.
I'm trying not to rag on Ubuntu, but Ubuntu defenders also need to
realise that for some people Ubuntu is not a good fit and they
shouldn't be too defensive about it.
Erik
--
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/
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