[Haskell-cafe] high probability of installation problems and quality of the glorious implementation

[Jason Dagit]

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo
<mle+hs at mega-nerd.com> wrote:
> FFT wrote:
>
>> I'm still learning Haskell and also evaluating whether I want to use
>> the language in my work.
>
> < snip>
>
>> For example, I tried installing GHC-6.10.2 on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine
>> (probably the most mainstream Linux these days).
>
> I'm on Ubuntu 8.10 and soon to move to 9.04 and I agree that the
> standard 6.8.2 compiler on Debian/Ubuntu is a PITA.

In particular, I advise my friends not to install GHC from apt on
Debian/Ubuntu because of the way the packages are fractured on those
distros.  Nothing but problems for casual Haskell hackers.  If you
know your distro and Haskell well, then sure it's easy to install all
the packages that constitute a normal ghc install.  For everyone else
it's just confusing and frustrating.  I've heard that from a distro
point of view the split packages are nice and that the solution to my
complaint is a proper meta or virtual package.

I wonder when we'll get a good haskell virtual package on Debian?

Just my $0.02,
Jason