[jaunty] Please sync ghc6 with latest upstream

[Andrey Zaitsev]

The ghc6 package and dependencies, proposed for the next release of Ubuntu (Jaunty), according to packages.ubuntu.com has version number 6.8.2 which is rather old. There is new upstream 6.10.1 version which has many bugfixes and very useful additions.

Please update ghc in jaunty.

[StefanPotyra (sistpoty)]

Sorry to say this, but most probably this is not going to happen for jaunty, because we're lacking manpower to do so (I don't find the time for this task at the moment, and I'm not aware that anyone else in Ubuntu or Debian is working on 6.10 atm.).

Any help would be greatly appreciated though!

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Kari Pahula got 6.10 into Debian exprimental 5 days after the last comment, so someone cares. :-)

6.10 contains a lot of good stuff to do with multicore parallelism, It is a great shame that Ubuntu won't get this before 09.10 at the earliest now :-(

[Someone561 (someone561)]

I have build the 6.10 for intrepid in my ppa: https://launchpad.net/~someone561/+archive/ppa
The one problem I had was that ghc6 depend on haddock and haddock on ghc6. But ghc6 build without haddock fine and after that I add again haddock as dependency.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Thanks for doing this to show it is possible (and should have been done for Jaunty :-)

Having said this I downloaded the Linux build from the central Haskell website and installed that in /opt/ghc on all 5 of my Ubuntu boxes and it seems to be working fine. I wonder if this is what others who need Haskell 6.10 on Debian and Ubuntu have done?

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

This is now in Debian unstable.

[Ketil Malde (ketil-ii)]

I'm just going to chime in and echo this request. Forcing users to install binary snapshots in order to compile recent software defeats the purpose of a distribution. I never quite understood how to create .debs, but I'm happy to test candidate packages, or whatever else is needed.

[Andrey Zaitsev (a-zaitsev)]

So far, so good, so what? 3 months passed and nothing happened... And that is not the only package frozen this way in its version. Hey, guys what's wrong with this distro??? Is it too much packages to carry on or what??? Should I mention eclipse or netbeans?? Where are you, maintainers???

[Iain Lane (laney)]

That is not helpful. The fact is that 6.10 landed in Debian too late for us to get it in for Jaunty. We will be able to get it in for Karmic, but there is a fair amount of work that goes into updating to a new version (rebuilding all dependent libs and applications), so if a new version is released later than FeatureFreeze it is probably not going to make it in. It is just a feature of our release model that we have to stabilise at some point.

We are not able to provide the latest crack all the time. Sometimes timing gets us, as happened here. Sometimes there's a lack of manpower. Sometimes there are technical difficulties. Often it's a combination. Jumping on maintainers does little to help, especially as we like to see new versions just as much as you do.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Andrey,

I must support what Iain said here, your comment is not constructive: there is nothing wrong (per se) with the Ubuntu distro. Ubuntu is more like Debian Stable than Debian Testing, There is a freeze point of packages for each release (6 monthly for Ubuntu, every 18--36 months for Debian Stable :-) Debian Testing, MacPorts, Fink, etc. are rolling update systems. If 6.10 were not in those I would be very worried.

So the problem here was that 6.10 did not get into Debian Testing (or at least Debian Unstable) for far too long. Once the package is in Debian Testing, it immediately gets included into the next Ubuntu. So as Iain says, 6.10 missed Jaunty but will make Karmic. Irritating, but natural for a time-structured distro such as Ubuntu.

Your point about Eclipse and NetBeans should really be aimed elsewhere, but again if there is a problem with versions, then the core issue is getting updated packages into Debian Testing. Actually I never use packages for Eclipse (or NetBeans) because of the stupid way it cannot handle per user plugins -- for example cf. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eclipse/+bug/5438 which is an Eclipse problem that they clearly don't care about. Actually I still prefer Emacs over Eclipse and NetBeans, but that is a debate for a different place.

[Ilmari Vacklin (wolverian)]

2009/3/23 Andrey Zaitsev <email address hidden>:
> Should I mention eclipse or netbeans?

Netbeans in Jaunty is version 6.5, which is the newest released version.

[Echo Nolan (echonolan)]

6.10.3 is in karmic.