linux packaging

[Mark Lentczner]

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.

Any opinions on these? We don't have to do just one - given the volunteers!

- Mark

P.S.: My instructions for building option 1 using Docker are here
<https://gist.github.com/mzero/156554bb60cb3cb613f8>.

* As far as I can tell, building against Wheezy is good for a large number
of distributions, and versions - GHC doesn't make use of anything very
fancy in glibc, so compiling against 2.13 (what is in wheezy), and the
matching other libs, should be fine - and continue to work through the
current releases of debian based distributions.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://projects.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-platform/attachments/20150607/8cf222d0/attachment.htm>