Hi. On 05/05/2011 12:19, cheater cheater wrote: >> 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. Yes, these are the two options. Note that neither of these really means "adding the platform to some older Ubuntu version": they're just other repositories that Ubuntu users can have, but they're not the official Ubuntu release. The second option is really easy: you just subscribe to Launchpad and create your PPA; the first one requires acceptance from the Ubuntu backport managers, but I'm not confident with the procedures needed, so I can't you anymore. >> 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 :) Whops, I always miss name-number association... >> 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. Well, you can install cabal without having the whole platform (package "cabal-install", which is also in lucid). Anyway, I somewhat got your point: I agree that it's best to have the whole platform easily installed with a simple package, instead of having to search through documentation how to work with cabal. Anyway, the packages in lucid are more than one year old, when the workflow of the Haskell Group still needed some fix. After all, this is the deal that you have to accept when you install an old release: you have more stability, but you have also older packages. Again, you can create a PPA or even try to get new packages into the backport repositories, this would be much appreciated. Unfortunately I don't think our group have the manpower to do it, but is you want to collaborate, we're happy to have you in (remembering that, anyway, our main focus is Debian). >>> 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. We usually solve this sort of problems with metapackages: we build singular packages for each Haskell package (well, some packages are directly embedded in the ghc Debian package) and then we build other packages that depend on many other packages (for example, we have "haskell-platform", that doesn't ship anything itself, but depends on the whole platform). Ciao, 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
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