Sun, 14 Mar 2010

GHC 6.12.1 in Debian Testing.

Joachim Breitner recently announced on the Debian Haskell mailing list that version 6.12.1 of the Glasgow/Glorious Haskell compiler was about to transition from Debian unstable to Debian testing. That has now happened. This means there is a very good chance it will be part of the next stable release of Debian.

A big thanks is due to Kari Pahula, the Debian maintainer for GHC who managed to get this version of GHC working on a bunch of CPU architectures not officially supported by the upstream GHC maintainers. Deserving of equal attention are Joachim Breitner and Marco Túlio Gontijo e Silva who did a large amount of real quality work to improve the way Haskell libraries are packaged in Debian.

The big change recently was drastic improvements in the way library dependencies are tracked across packages which will make it much easier to write tools to automatically check for broken dependency chains. Packaging Haskell libraries for Debian is now a relatively trivial and fool proof exercise. Packaging a library which is on Hackage can take as little as 5 minutes.

With the current version of GHC in Debian and a large and growing collection of Haskell libraries, writing Haskell code on Debian using nothing but Debian packages is now a pleasure. Ubuntu and other Debian and Ubuntu derived distributions of course also benefit from this work.

Posted at: 18:58 | Category: CodeHacking/Debian | Permalink

Wed, 01 Jul 2009

Three More for the Debian New Queue.

Over the last couple of weeks I've managed to get three new packages into the Debian NEW queue :

Thanks to Simon Horman for sponsoring/uploading the first two of and Matt Palmer for sponsoring/uploading haskell-json.

Posted at: 18:32 | Category: CodeHacking/Debian | Permalink

Mon, 15 Jun 2009

Two More for the Debian New Queue.

I've got two new packages in the Debian NEW queue :

These two libraries are obviously useful in their own right, but I was particularly interested in packaging these because they are build dependencies for hoogle which I'm currently working on packaging.

Thanks to Simon Horman for sponsoring these uploads and the previous ones.

Posted at: 22:31 | Category: CodeHacking/Debian | Permalink

Tue, 09 Jun 2009

Debian Maintainer.

With the closing of Debian bug #531811 I am now officially a Debian Maintainer.

Although I've been using Debian and related distributions for nearly a decade, for most of that time I've been pretty happy just being an upstream developer and a downstream user.

That changed when I started learning and using Haskell some 6 months ago. After using Ocaml on Debian for about four years I had grown spoilt by the work of the Ocaml Debian Maintainers who do a stellar job in keeping the everything Ocaml related in Debian up to date. Any time I needed a new Ocaml library, it was nearly always just an apt-get install away.

Unfortunately Haskell on Debian is in a poor state in comparison to Ocaml. My main aim in becoming a Debian Maintainer is to improve Haskell on Debian. First of all, I will be packaging Haskell libraries. So far I have make Debian packages of the following three Hackage packages :

I have also joined the Debian Haskell Mailing List and hope to help out on packaging and improving the compiler version transition process.

Posted at: 19:52 | Category: CodeHacking/Debian | Permalink