The last 'round I made a linux "bindist" style distribution of the platform available. While awkward, it met a need that once the platform is released, people want it. Given that this time, I'm going to try to have the platform ready as 7.10.2 is out - people are going to want it even more.
There is no doubt that packages made for a particular distribution, and available from that distribution's repositories, are the easiest thing for people to use. However, for most of the distributions, the available Haskell Platform is very old and doesn't keep up. Even for those distributions where the newer HPs are available, they generally haven't been back ported to prior releases of the distributions, even when those releases are still in wide use. I'd like for there to be a way for users to get and install the platform on popular linux distributions the day 7.10.2 comes out. Here are several options: 1) bindist tarball, built on a minimal Debian Wheezy (7) image (glibc 2.13), configured to reside at /usr/local/haskell/ghc-7.10.2/ - user must untar as root over /, then run the activate-hs script 2) a single deb binary package, built as in option 1, but with control scripts so that it can be installed (and activated), as well as uninstalled, with dpkg. 3) a docker image of Debian Jessie (8, stable), with the platform built as in #1, and pre-installed. 4) a docker image like #3, but built on Ubuntu 14.04 5) the deb packages for GHC, and each part, as has been built for the distributions. These would have to reside in some PPA that we stand up somewhere - preferably, these would be either built against Wheezy(*), or have backported versions. Any opinions on these? We don't have to do just one - given the volunteers! - Mark P.S.: My instructions for building option 1 using Docker are here <https://gist.github.com/mzero/156554bb60cb3cb613f8>. * As far as I can tell, building against Wheezy is good for a large number of distributions, and versions - GHC doesn't make use of anything very fancy in glibc, so compiling against 2.13 (what is in wheezy), and the matching other libs, should be fine - and continue to work through the current releases of debian based distributions.
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