Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development

Simon Marlow marlowsd at gmail.com
Tue Jun 2 07:57:11 EDT 2009


I forget who mentioned this to me, but I think it's a great idea.

Things like VirtualBox and VMWare are pretty easy to install and set up 
these days.  It wouldn't be hard for someone to create a VM image of a 
Linux system with a complete GHC development environment set up and 
ready to go.

This would have a lot of benefits:

  * Easy to buy into: just install VirtualBox (or whatever), download
    the image, register it and away you go.

  * Would make the barrier to entry much lower for someone who wants
    to make a small change, e.g. to the docs, or a library.  validate
    and 'darcs send' would Just Work.

  * Would serve as an example of best-practice in setting up a GHC
    development environment.

The hard part might be optimising the install so that we don't end up 
with an enormous image file.  We'd probably need to find a suitably 
minimal Linux install, or start from an existing minimal Linux VM image.

Anyone feeling keen?

Cheers,
	Simon


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