[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: Best Linux for Haskell?

[Ben Franksen]

Martin DeMello wrote:
> On 11/6/07, Maurí­cio <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe (and only maybe), before choosing a
>> distribution, you should choose a package system,
>> since that's what you are going to use to install
>> software. Look for RPM and APT, and see what you
>> think. With my package system (I don't wanna give
>> you any prejudice, so I won't tell you it's APT),
>> I can get upgrades easily. But that's because I
>> know how to use it. There are also other options
>> beside RPM and APT.
> 
> Gentoo's portage (inspired by FreeBSD's ports) is the best linux
> packaging system I've come across, but I wouldn't recommend Gentoo
> itself as a first distro. It makes a brilliant second one, though.

Even better, at least in theory, is Nix (http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html).
Unfortunately it is not yet mature. And of course nobody uses it (yet ;-)

BTW, Nix is based on a purely functional package description language which
is also maximally lazy, meaning that syntactically equal terms are /always/
shared and only evaluated once. (And yes, it is of course turing complete.)

Cheers
Ben