Job for someone: make a VM image for GHC development

[Corey O'Connor]

On a related note: I have an amazon EC2 machine image* based on Ubuntu
Server edition with the following set up:
- GHC 6.10.3 + locally installed documentation
- cabal install

Which is, IMO, the baseline requirements of a haskell dev environment.
What other packages would be useful?

I'd imagine the setup for a VM image and an a Amazon EC2 image would
have an identical base. Well, maybe the amazon EC2 image should use a
server distro while the vm image a desktop distro?

-Corey O'Connor

* I don't know how to release the machine image such that it's
paramaterized by a public/private key unique to the user. Once I
figure that out I'll make sure it's public.

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:57 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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