Trouble trying to find packages for ubuntu linux

[Brian Hulley]

Hi,
I'm a total linux newbie and am trying to get ghc6.6 installed together
with all the libraries. I'm using Ubuntu linux which uses Debian package
format but has its own repositories which only have ghc6.4.2 at the
moment.

>From the ghc downloads page it says the Debian packages are in Debian
testing and unstable (I assume 'testing' is the one people are supposed
to use(?)). I've managed to get ghc by itself by just browsing the
Debian testing repo at http://packages.debian.org/testing/devel/
but the problem arises when I try to get the library packages, since
some of them eg libghc6-base-dev, libghc6-base-prof are not listed there
(also not found in the unstable repo at the corresponding url above).

I'm trying to find all the ghc library packages so I can download them
to my own computer and make a local repository to then add to
my /etc/apt/sources.list so that I can install the libs without the
danger of their dependencies causing other things in the Debian
repository to overwrite stuff I've already got from the Ubuntu
repository (I've read about apt pinning but this is far too complicated
and risky for me at my level of inexperience, and the last time I added
the whole Debian repo to my apt sources I make a complete mess of my
installation and had to start from scratch...).

The ideal thing would be if there was a ghc repo hosted by haskell.org
containing only ghc* + libghc* so that any Debian-related linux distro
could use it safely by adding the repo to the software sources, so that
other things the packages depend on could be obtained from the
distro-specific repository as usual (eg libc etc).

In any case has anyone managed to get the latest ghc + libs installed in
Ubuntu without breaking their system (or their mind :-)) ?

Thanks, Brian.