Hiya,I will confess that I was being provocative and over-dramatic on purpose…
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 11:05:20AM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
Hi, let me try to mediate a bit here. Erik is making observations that he made. I do not read his mails accusative or even demanding. I think this is perfectly valid. Iain, please do not let your motivation down by this. Rather, try to think it through from Eirk’s point of view and see if there maybe is a solution that he is not aware of. In general it is true that no operation system release fulfills alls requirements. Haskell developement is currently quite fast, too fast for either Ubuntus or Debians releases. I also have problems running some Haskell code (darcswatch in particular) on a Debian stable system. But since at least one of the reasons for packaging Haskell stuff in Debian is to be able to build binaries from it (darcs et. al.), this is still a useful situation.
Yeah, it is. It's a frustrating situation for distro developers to be in really. In general, you don't find the users of C libraries, for example, downloading and compiling the latest crack from the upstream website. I wish it weren't so for Haskell too. This is a general appeal to library developers to care for API stability and, I guess, an appeal to instructors to encourage their students to work within the system they are given — not against it.
What package (versions) are exactly lacking in an Ubuntu release, and for what use case? Students probably only need a few updated libraries. Such need could be served by setting up a PPA repository, assuming there would be volunteers to maintain them, right? (I’m not saying that it is Iain tasks to set that up or anything like that!)
This might work for leaf-ish packages, but for anything with a non-trivial dependency graph quickly becomes a lot of work. I'm not against the idea, but again it feels like an admission of defeat.
Do we really think that our model is unsuitable for *developers*? Can we work with the haskell library community to fix this? Is it just that the ecosystem is too immature and needs some time?
Iain
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