Linux packaging of Haskell Platform

[Ben Gamari]

On 06/07/2015 11:39 PM, Mark Lentczner wrote:
> The last 'round I made a linux "bindist" style distribution of the
> platform available. While awkward, it met a need that once the platform
> is released, people want it. Given that this time, I'm going to try to
> have the platform ready as 7.10.2 is out - people are going to want it
> even more.
>
> There is no doubt that packages made for a particular distribution, and
> available from that distribution's repositories, are the easiest thing
> for people to use. However, for most of the distributions, the available
> Haskell Platform is very old and doesn't keep up. Even for those
> distributions where the newer HPs are available, they generally haven't
> been back ported to prior releases of the distributions, even when those
> releases are still in wide use.
>
> I'd like for there to be a way for users to get and install the platform
> on popular linux distributions the day 7.10.2 comes out. Here are
> several options:
>
> 1) bindist tarball, built on a minimal Debian Wheezy (7) image (glibc
> 2.13), configured to reside at /usr/local/haskell/ghc-7.10.2/ - user
> must untar as root over /, then run the activate-hs script
>
> 2) a single deb binary package, built as in option 1, but with control
> scripts so that it can be installed (and activated), as well as
> uninstalled, with dpkg.
>
> 3) a docker image of Debian Jessie (8, stable), with the platform built
> as in #1, and pre-installed.
>
> 4) a docker image like #3, but built on Ubuntu 14.04
>
> 5) the deb packages for GHC, and each part, as has been built for the
> distributions. These would have to reside in some PPA that we stand up
> somewhere - preferably, these would be either built against Wheezy(*),
> or have backported versions.
>

I think it would be great if we could continue to offer deb and rpm 
packaging (#5) for the major distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, 
Redhat, and perhaps Centos), hosting our own repositories to ensure 
things remain up-to-date.. It appears that Joachim is currently the 
maintainer of the the existing Ubuntu and Debian side of things.

Joachim, the proposal here is to host a package repo for hosting recent 
Haskell Platform releases to reduce the time-to-users. Would you have 
any objection here? I could offer some assistance as well. I remember 
hearing somewhere that Debian will be gaining some PPA-like 
functionality. Is this true?

On the Redhat front, I think we really need some Redhat users to help 
with the RPM packaging. Jens, you appear to be the most active user in 
the haskel-platform changelog; will you be continuing this?. Any volunteers?

For the remaining distributions I think we just need to at very least 
#1. I'm not terribly familiar with Docker but it seems like it would 
provide far more isolation than we would need or want.

Cheers,

- Ben