JustHub 'Sherkin' Release

[Chris Dornan]

I am pleased to announce the Sherkin release of the JustHub distribution of
Haskell for Enterprise Linux and the release of the Hub source code on
which the distribution is based to Hackage and GitHub.

The JustHub distribution is distinctive in providing a comprehensive
back-catalogue of GHC tool chains (back to 6.10.4) and major Haskell
Platform releases (currently back to 2011.2.0.1) as well as the timely
appearance of leading edge GHC releases (such as GHC 7.4.2) in addition
to the Haskell Platform de jour (2012.2.0.0), all of which can be deployed
simultaneously on the same system.

Previous releases of the distribution have been confined to Red Hat
Enterprise
Linux versions 5 and 6 (and of course CentOS and Scientific Linux); this
release expands this coverage to Fedora Linux 16 and 17, which can deployed
along side or integrated into Fedora Linux's excellent native Haskell
distribution.

The JustHub distribution is based on the Hub system for sandbox development
that allows each work tree to work in its own sandboxed environment with a
specific tool chain and a private user-package database. All of the standard
Haskell tools inter-operate cleanly and transparently with the sandboxes
and operate in the normal way outside of them.

Sandboxed environments (hubs) can be shared between work trees as well
as being (re)named, annotated, replicated, swapped, archived, locked
and removed. Proper package deletion with the option of garbage collecting
orphaned code and documentation is also supported.

If anyone would like to incorporate the hub system into a Haskell
distribution
or port it to a non-Posix system then they are very welcome to contact me
(though be warned: time is tight just now).

Note that while the distro has had plenty of serious usage (funnily enough
it is popular with build-bot admins) it has also been recently extended
and revised  the software remains in beta testing for now.

For news, documentation, articles, download and installation instructions,
links to the repositories and trackers etc., see http://justhub.org.

Chris Dornan