[Haskell-cafe] Cleaning up the Debian act (report from the trenches)

[Ketil Malde]

I've had an interested user, who tried to get one of my programs to
run on a Debian machine - running Debian Etch, released a couple of
months ago.  Here are some of the hurdles stumbled upon in the
process:

1. Etch comes with ghc-6.6, and that didn't work with my .cabal file.
2. ghc-6.8.3, presumably the binary snapshots, didn't work, neither
   in i386 nor in x86_64 incarnation.
3. ghc 6.8.1-i386 appears to work, but some of the dependencies failed
   to compile (tagsoup, in this case)
4. A precompiled (by me), statically linked binary refuses to run with
   a message of "FATAL: kernel too old".

Granted, not all of this is our fault, but it won't help users to
start charging the windmills of Debian conservativism.  We really need
to make this process smoother, and ideally, provide debs for Etch
backports.

I'm not sure how to go about any of this, beyond debianizing my own
packages.  But that's why I'm telling you. :-)

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants