[Haskell-cafe] haskell-platform problems on (latest) knoppix

[Toby Hutton]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 06:04:12PM -0400, dhw at thedance.net wrote:
> Background: I'm an experienced Linuxer, but not experienced with the Debian
> package-management tools.  I recently decided it was time to renew my
> acquaintance with Haskell, which began before the do-notation, with Hugs. 
> Seeing the warnings on the ghc website, I decided to install a Linux
> distribution with a strongly checked package system.  I chose Knoppix-7.2.0
> i386 (the latest, dated mid-2013), which installed with few problems (now
> fixed).  It claimed to be based on wheezy, the stable branch. 
> Even though the version of haskell-platform in wheezy/stable
> was from mid-2012, I presumed it would be debugged by now - after all,
> that's
> what "stable" is supposed to mean.  So I hooked it up to the net, and
> entered
> 
>       apt-get install haskell-platform

I have a VPS which is can only run old Ubuntu LTS which has GHC 7.4.1 and
associated out of date libraries.  So I install GHC from the binary tarball (to
/usr/local) and then use cabal for any extra libraries I need.  No apt-get, no
Haskell Platform.

If you're just getting back into Haskell you may find that 'apt-get install ghc'
or the tarball is all you need, the platform may be overkill.