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

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Freitag, den 22.08.2008, 10:13 +0100 schrieb Magnus Therning:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 2:32 AM, David Bremner <bremner at unb.ca> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> To add to this I suspect that there are more people involved in the
> perl team than there even are DDs with ghc6 installed, but maybe I'm
> just being negative.  Maybe the time is ripe for a Debian haskell
> team?  I know the idea has been floated before on the Debian Haskell
> list but I don't think it's ever gained any momentum.

I had it floated to the debian-haskell mailing list once, but as you
said, there were not much responses. 

The Debian Perl Group (which was started by me some years ago) is indeed
a good example for good library package maintenance. What made it
successful was, in my opinion, people with constant devotion (that was
not me :-)) and a faible for developing tools for the team. Have a look
at http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi and you see
how it was possible to maintain this number of packages with just a few
people.

Incidentally, a few days ago Ian Lynagh was asking if someone wants to
take over his haskell packages, so if there were a group to be formed,
it could start with all the base packages.

OTOH, this leaves the question open of who will maintain the compiler
itself. Of course, this is a totally different thing than maintaining
cabalized libraries and so far, no one has stepped up to give it a shot.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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