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

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:20 PM, David Bremner <bremner at unb.ca> wrote:
>
> Ketil Malde wrote:
>
>>Another Debian question, once I've populated the debian/ directory one
>>way or another, how should this be integrated with the rest of the
>>project?  Should it be part of the darcs archive, or a separate
>>archive (foo-debian), or what?  How do people organize this?
>
> debian-mentors at lists.debian.org is a good place for generic debian
> packaging questions.  After you have a package which works, and which
> hopefully lintian (a tool for checking debian packages) does not
> complain about, you can ask on debian-mentors for a sponsor, who will
> check over the package and hopefully upload it. Right now there is not
> too much interest in uploading new packages, because people are trying
> to get lenny out the door.

I've personally had _very_ limited success in getting any haskell
packages (both libs and apps) to attract any interest on
debian-mentors.  This is very unfortunate.  I suspect this is due to
haskell being an unknown language to most people on that list, and I
also suspect that the rather strict (but completely called for) rules
about dependencies and versions for haskell packages are unknown to
most DDs.  I've long thought that the DDs who are on debian-haskell
are in an excellent position to  change all of this, but I've never
pushed very much on this.

I've only ever gotten a single comment on an RFS for a haskell
package.  The comment was "scary looking package"
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2007/10/msg00389.html).

AFAICS there is great room for improvement here, but this conversation
should probably move to debian-haskell or debian-mentor...

/M