[Haskell-cafe] Best platform for development with GHC?

[cheater cheater]

Hi,
let me chime in as someone who wanted to deploy a Haskell app on a
fairly popular hosting environment (Slicehost).
The support of GHC on the Ubuntu server front is tragic - there's no
official Haskell Platform for the currently suggested server version
of Ubuntu, which is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS ("Long Term Support"). It will
still have to be supported for the next about-five years. Setting
aside arguments of whether Ubuntu is the best choice for a server, it
is fairly popular, and easy to use. You can expect any developer who
wants to jump into Haskell for e.g. web-related servers to use Ubuntu,
because it's easy. 10.04 LTS only has single GHC packages and some
other stuff, but the Platform is missing. It is impossible to compile
HP on a virtual server, and cross-compiling is beyond the casual
user's skill. The solution would be to have a PPA with binaries that
people can use - PPA usage is well documented and popular among Ubuntu
folks.

In the end this project died off because I simply could not get HP into the box.

Notice that - ironically - Ubuntu 10.10 and further versions, none of
which are Long Term Support versions, do have HP as a package.

I hope this can happen and that it can be officially backed - as
opposed to a halfway-effort which will be someone hosting a private
PPA, getting bored of it after 3 months/weeks/hours, and the whole
situation returning to an even worse state than it was before.

I hope we can get good Haskell support for the most popular server
version of one of the most popular Linux distribution, because frankly
the current options are just terrible and useless.

Cheers,
D.

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 08:40, Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org> wrote:
> "John D. Ramsdell" <ramsdell0 at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Developers should be using older versions of GHC because they cannot
>> be sure users will have an up-to-date GHC.
>
> I wonder, how hard would it be to have, say Amazon images of various
> Linux distributions with ghc and cabal-install available?  Currently, I
> have a discontious integration server that checks my stuff by pulling
> off hackage, but this is a bit limited, as well as a security risk.  I'd
> consider running something off Amazon instead - perhaps it could
> even be automated, so that I could do 'cabal install whatever' in
> parallel on a slew of configurations?  And, although I could probably
> pay for my own stuff, perhaps Amazon could contribute (som of) the CPU
> time?
>
> -k
> --
> If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
>
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