On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 07:24:36PM +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
> > ...under what
> > circumstances would Debian stable users need to *compile* (as
> > opposed to fetching a binary) *new* versions of Darcs?
> > For the new bit, I think it would be if we were ever to release
> > a version of Darcs that fixed some crucial bug (say a pending
> > patch issue).
>
> What if there is a new feature or functionality that I happen to need
> that is still only in HEAD? That has happened in the past.
You can always build your own version of GHC newer than what your
distribution provides. And if you tweak the GHC build configuration
a little bit, it doesn't take the usual lot of time and memory to
build. For example, you can disable library and rts ways for debugging
and profiling, and you can also omit building the documentation
(which takes *lot* of memory) buy putting this into mk/build.mk before
building GHC:
SplitObjs=NO
GhcLibWays=v # For GHC <= 6.10, omit the `v'
GhcRTSWays=
HADDOCK_DOCS=NO
LATEX_DOCS=NO
BUILD_DOCBOOK_HTML=NO
Note that you can't build GHC-6.12 or newer with GHC-6.6, you *have* to
build GHC-6.10 first and then use it to build GHC-6.12 (or newer).
> If the darcs team decides to disqualify everyone using Debian stable
> and equivalent from contributing to darcs, that of course is up to
> you. I personally have unfortunately not had the time to contribute
> so far *blushes*.
As someone who is involved in doing packages (not for Debian, but
for OpenBSD), I can only say that it's not the developers' duty to
care about backports, it's the distribution maintainers job. If
they don't want to backport a newer of darcs (for whatever reason),
then you have to do it yourself or use another distribution/another
flavor (i.e. not Debian stable).
> The bottom line is: there are Linux users and developers (me one
> of them) who use Debian stable quite heavily.
I don't think that Debian stable is meant as a system usable for
development of bleeding-edge software. Heck, even OpenBSD with its
6-month release cycle isn't good for this; I'm doing all development
and porting on OpenBSD-current, typically not older than a week.
Ciao,
Kili
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