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

[David Bremner]

Ketil Malde wrote:


>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.  

Your user is pretty much at the pessimal point in the release cycle.
Etch is more than a year old, and lenny (the next release) is in
pre-release freeze.  None of which helps your users, of course.
Perhaps things will improve once lenny is out.

[non-working versions snipped]

>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.

Another option is to try installing the version from lenny (6.8.2).
This may or may not pull in a wack of dependencies, but is not
difficult to try out [1].

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

There was some discussion on the list recently about a tool to
semi-automatically debianize haskell packages. Perhaps this is of
interest to you.

There is also a debian-haskell [2] list, which might be relevant.

David



[1]: http://wiki.debian.org/AptPinning
[2]: currently at http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/debian-haskell
     but possible moving.