[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell-friendly Linux Distribution

Ivan Miljenovic ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com
Mon Mar 29 23:01:19 EDT 2010


On 30 March 2010 13:55, Jason Dagit <dagit at codersbase.com> wrote:
> The reason I started telling everyone to avoid GHC in apt was the way it was
> packaged.  Casual Haskell users would install GHC but get something like
> 1/10th of the libraries GHC installs when you do a source install

Is  that because Debian didn't bundle the extralibs with GHC?  If so,
then that's a fallacy that people thought those libraries came with
GHC (so much so that with 6.10.4 a lot of people were complaining that
GHC no longer shipped with network, when technically it never did).

> [..] they would struggle to find them and when when
> they did find out where to get them the answer was often, "It should have
> come with ghc".

No, they shouldn't have.  These libraries should be packaged
individually, especially since Hackage started being used a lot.

> [..] now trying to profile something, oh wait, some problem again.

Agreed, if Debian didn't include the profiling libraries with GHC
(though is this due to how Debian does packages?).

>  If it had been an install from the ghc source

As in a custom compile from source?  In that case there would
definitely not have been any extralibs unless you explicitly added
them.

> To me, until there is one obvious package to install to get the same set of
> files as a normal ghc install I will continue to discourage people from
> getting ghc from apt :)

Unless it still doesn't provide profiling libraries, the extralibs
problem is no more.  There is, however, the Haskell Platform (which
Debian seems to have almost had complete support for until the new one
came out; now they've got to start again... >_> ).

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com


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