[Haskell-cafe] PRE-ANNOUNCE: cabal-debian (automatically debianize cabal packages)

David Bremner bremner at unb.ca
Thu Aug 21 21:35:50 EDT 2008


At Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:52:00 -0400 (EDT),
Christopher Lane Hinson wrote:
> 
> I'm not a DD, but I think uploading ~500 hackage packages to debian would
> be a bit of a no-no.  Debian packages are expected to have active
> maintainers both upstream and on the debian side, and to build without a
> hitch on ten different architectures, or they don't make it into stable
> and the DD responsible gets whined at.

Fundamentally I think Lane is correct, but it is worth noting that the
debian perl team maintains 938 CPAN modules. The effort involved is
not trivial, but the number of consistently active people involved is
not so huge (maybe 5 core people, and lots of people who are
interested in one or two packages).

Now, there are only 1217 registered installs of ghc6 on debian,
compared to 74000+ perl installs (essentially everyone installs perl I
guess), so it is not clear that the critical mass exists for a debian
perl style team.

One of the main tools that makes this possible is dh-make-perl, which is the 
moral equivalent of cabal-debian, I guess.  Just as important is the shared 
version control setup and team procedures.

David






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