ghc6 (Haskell compiler) becoming old

[Stefan Potyra]

Hi,

Am Sonntag 06 Januar 2008 08:15:18 schrieb Paul Dufresne:
> One of my new year resolution is to become a not too bad Haskell
> programmer in 2008.

That's great to hear... I hope you're also into packaging a little bit, 
because we're really in need of people dealing with haskell-related packages.

> That said, I would like to have latest development version of ghc6
> (Glasgow Haskell Compiler) which is the most well known Haskell
> compiler in Haskell community, inside Hardy.
>
> Unfortunately, Debian Sid just have the 6.6.1 version (that was
> released april 26, 2007) and the current version on ghc web site is
> 6.8.2. (released december 12, 2007).
> See http://packages.debian.org/sid/ghc6 for Debian packages.
> See http://www.haskell.org/ghc/index.html for upstream version.
>
> According to http://www.haskell.org/ghc/distribution_packages.html#debian
> we should expect to find latest version at:
> http://haskell-unsafe.alioth.debian.org/haskell-unsafe.html
> but even there it is only at 6.6.1 (oct 12, 2006), see:
> http://haskell-unsafe.alioth.debian.org/archive/i386/unstable/g/ghc6/
> (Please don't ask me how they had 6.6.1 for Debian oct 12, 2006, as it
> was released only april 26, 2007, I don't know)
>
> I found that, but I am not sure how relevant it is:
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-haskell/?opt=dir&sc=1
> It seems to be very recently updated (3 days ago).
>
> I am pretty sure there is/was a Debian Haskell mailing list, but I
> don't find it any more in:
> http://lists.debian.org/completeindex.html

The debian haskell mailing list can be found at [1].

>
> I am not an Ubuntu nor Debian developer.
> I could consider to try packaging it, but as this is a pretty complicated
>
> *Maybe* the reason is that many sub libraries need to be rebuilt with
> a new compiler,
> and *maybe* this is a lot of job, I don't know.
>
> Hope someone here can inform me better about this.

Well, afaict Ian is still testing/bootstrapping the newer ghc6 on different 
arches [2], hence the delay in Debian.

Once the newer ghc6 is in Debian, still all library packages need to get 
transitioned (which ranges from easy stuff like mere rebuilds or rebuilds 
with only running update-haskell-control to various code changes in 
packages).

Though I've taken care of haskell stuff in Ubuntu for some time, I wouldn't 
say that I've got the knowledge to upload a new upstream version of ghc to 
Ubuntu ahead of Debian (and also not the time to do so). 

Given that Ian's ghc6 packages are usually of a very high quality I wouldn't 
mind going for 6.8 once it enters unstable and we're not yet in upstream 
version freeze for hardy.

Cheers,
   Stefan.
--
[1]: <http://urchin.earth.li/mailman/listinfo/debian-haskell>
[2]: 
<http://urchin.earth.li/pipermail/debian-haskell/2008-January/000363.html>
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