Re: [Pkg-haskell-maintainers] Haskell Platform package needed in Ubuntu 10.04
Hi Giovanni,
thanks for your helpful reply. I enclose my answers below.
Best regards,
D.
> Moreover, this list is meant for the Debian operating system (and I'm a
> Debian developer, not an Ubuntu one). While there are also some Ubuntu
> developers hanging around and coworking with us, this is definitely not
> the place to take some authoritative decision for Ubuntu.
Thanks. After some research it turns out the people telling me so
might have been confused because you guys are mentioned as the
original maintainers, but I see that the ubuntu maintainers are indeed
separate. I will be contacting the maintainers listed there.
After reading through the Ubuntu community process documentation it
turns out the two ways to get haskell-platform into a distribution
which has feature freeze are 1. put it in a backports repository,
using a package from a newer ubuntu; or 2. make a ppa.
> I don't understand what you consider a "Haskell Platform package". In
> maverick there is a "haskell-platform" package that depends on all the
> packages for the platform distributed with Maverick:
>
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/haskell-platform
>
> What's its problem?
Maverick is 10.10, not 10.04. Version 10.04 does not have that, and it
should, that's the whole point :)
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 23:36, Giovanni Mascellani <gio@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi.
>
> On 03/05/2011 21:34, cheater cheater wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I have been informed this is the right place to ask:
>
> Well, kind of: the list you wrote to is primarily meant for automatic
> messages; you should use debian-haskell@lists.debian.org instead. I'm
> moving the discussion there.
>
>> What are the
>> steps neede for Ubuntu 10.04 to get the Haskell Platform? It's good
>> enough if it's similar to the ones in Maverick (Ubuntu 10.10) or one
>> of the newer versions. An update to ghc 7 would also be good.
>
> Ubuntu 10.04 has been released one year ago, so it's a stable
> distribution now. I'm not completely aware of the update policy enforced
> by Ubuntu for the released distributions, but I don't think it's easy to
> add new packages or a new major version of GHC, as they're clearly
> totally optional for most Ubuntu users. I really doubt they would be
> accepted for Debian stable, and don't think that Ubuntu's policy is
> significantly weaker.
>
> That said, it seems that Ubuntu has some backport repositories for maverick:
>
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick-backports/
>
> I don't know anything about the policy in use, so you should probably
> investigate that and understand who's responsible for them.
>
> Remember, anyway, that users are free to install packages directly using
> cabal.
You can't "cabal install" if you don't have cabal - haskell platform
brings that too. Granted you can install cabal separately, but that's
not obvious for people. The haskell documentation still needs to
improve to naturally steer people towards either haskell platform or
cabal, for example Hackage only links you to a tarball and doesn't
mention the steps to install either of them. If I'm new to Haskell,
have just installed GHC, want to install Control.Monad.Exception, and
don't know about cabal, then that's a big problem for me.
>> If this is not the right place, please direct me where I should go to
>> request this to be done.
>>
>> If there's any information needed, please don't hesitate to ask.
>>
>> Motivation:
>>
>> Ubuntu 10.04 is LTS, it will hang around until at least 2015, and
>> after it stops being supported by Canonical it's still going to be on
>> some deployments. Using 10.04 LTS is currently for many people the
>> right choice if they want to run Ubuntu on a server, or in educational
>> institutions, which are exactly the kind of environments that Haskell
>> is trying to reach.
>>
>> The current package layout for Haskell under Ubuntu 10.04 is that it's
>> split across multiple packages. It does not conform to the usual
>> Haskell package layout.
>
> Why? Usually Haskell developers split their work in many small packages:
> there are some Hackage packages that have no more than a dozen lines of
> code. We'd love not to have this fragmentation, but have no choice over it.
Yeah, that's no problem, but again it's about the haskell *platform*
itself - i.e. the "solid base" that every haskell developer should be
furnished with. Atomizing that is fairly counter-productive. There are
reasons to have only part of the Haskell Platform installed, but
they're fairly advanced and anyone who can identify such problems can
also figure out how to install GHC by themselves.
> Putting more than one Haskell package in one Debian package is not an
> easy thing: it's on our TODO list to understand how that could be
> accomplished. If you have good idea, we're listening for you, of course! :-)
>
> In the meantime, we're forced to equivalence "one Haskell package per
> Debian package".
>
>> This in turn means that the documentation on
>> the official Haskell-related pages is contrary to what needs to be
>> done in order to install and use Haskell on 10.04.
>>
>> As an additional note, when spoken to about this issue. Don Stewart
>> (one of the main Haskell community supporters) has mentioned he didn't
>> know 10.04 LTS would be hanging around for so long and if that's the
>> case he definitely thinks it's a good idea to make a Haskell Platform
>> package available for 10.04.
>
>
> Cheers, Giovanni.
> --
> Giovanni Mascellani <mascellani@poisson.phc.unipi.it>
> Pisa, Italy
>
> Web: http://poisson.phc.unipi.it/~mascellani
> Jabber: g.mascellani@jabber.org / giovanni@elabor.homelinux.org
>
>
Reply to: