[Haskell-cafe] Best Linux Distro for >>=

[Mark Wright]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2011 21:46:53 -0700, Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> On Jun 18, 2011, at 8:48 PM, Tom Murphy wrote:
> 
> > Hi List,
> >   If my choice of Lunix distro depended 100% on its solidness as a
> > Haskell devel platform (I am), what would you all recommend?
> > 
> 
> 
> If you are going to install the haskell platform and then use Cabal it
> really does not matter. Any of the current distros work just fine.
> 
> On the other hand if you want to stick to supplied packages then you would
> be best served looking at the package lists and making your mind up from
> there.

You don't have to stick to the supplied packages though, you can
create your own.  

Arch linux:
The cabal2arch command is used to create the package, then I guess you
can submit it to the AUR database.

Gentoo:
hackport merge pkgname

Then often the only thing that is required is to edit the ebuild
and either:

(1) remove the lower range bound
or
(2) remove the upper range bound
or
(3) specify the range check to something like:
=dev-haskell/attoparsec-0.9*

As gentoo can not handle having more than 1 range check dependency in
the ebuild.  Your created ebuilds can be installed in your own overlay
if you are not ready to publish them yet, say in
/usr/local/portage/
or you can fork:

https://github.com/gentoo-haskell/gentoo-haskell

Use git rebase to rebase your commits into a linear history, and
submit a pull request (which might require tweaking to be accepted)

The Gentoo haskell overlay is currently on ghc 7.0.4 with the
latest haskell platform.  When ghc was bumped to 7.0.4 earlier
this week, I just ran:

haskell-updater

and it rebuilt hundreds of Haskell packages with the new ghc.

Gentoo supports live ebuilds.  For example, to install
Cloud Haskell from github:

emerge -a dev-haskell/remote

Normally there are other considerations on which linux distribution to use,
like:

(1) Ease of installation and maintenance of the operating system.
Gentoo is difficult to install and maintain, it requires learning to be
a Linux expert.

(2) Gentoo is a source based distribution.  This offers more flexibility,
however it also means you need a powerful machine.  For a notebook
I think it should be a games machine or workstation notebook in
order to be chunky and have good cooling.

Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD:

I don't use them, however I think they have very good support for
Haskell packaging.  For example, Fedora updates the haddock documentation
index as pkgs are installed and removed (on Gentoo you need to run your
own script manually to update the haddock documentation index.
The haddock documentation is built with these use flags: doc hscolour).

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Haskell

If the os distribution is missing a package that you need, then I think
you can create and pkg it yourself.

Regards, Mark