On 06/07/2015 11:39 PM, Mark Lentczner wrote:
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.
I think it would be great if we could continue to offer deb and rpm packaging (#5) for the major distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Redhat, and perhaps Centos), hosting our own repositories to ensure things remain up-to-date.. It appears that Joachim is currently the maintainer of the the existing Ubuntu and Debian side of things.
Joachim, the proposal here is to host a package repo for hosting recent Haskell Platform releases to reduce the time-to-users. Would you have any objection here? I could offer some assistance as well. I remember hearing somewhere that Debian will be gaining some PPA-like functionality. Is this true?
On the Redhat front, I think we really need some Redhat users to help with the RPM packaging. Jens, you appear to be the most active user in the haskel-platform changelog; will you be continuing this?. Any volunteers?
For the remaining distributions I think we just need to at very least #1. I'm not terribly familiar with Docker but it seems like it would provide far more isolation than we would need or want.
Cheers, - Ben _______________________________________________ Haskell-platform mailing list Haskell-platform@projects.haskell.org http://projects.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-platform
