Hacker News Reader

Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

All distros are way behind on shipping Haskell and it's not very easy to build from source because of the bootstrapping problem. This is being worked on.

However, your statement about Ruby, Python, Perl and Node is BS. Especially Ruby is very hairy to get up and running unless you are happy with old versions from your distro. Setting up the Haskell platform is not a lot more difficult than tinkering with rvm and bundler and whatnot to get Ruby up and running. Python is a little better because most useful libs are included in the "batteries" that ship with the interpreter. But try to use a bunch of libs and you enter virtualenv hell.

And whenever a new major change comes out, a new world of hurt begins. Ruby 1.9, Python 3 and Perl 6 transitions have been really painful.

If these languages work better, it's only because your distro package maintainers spend more time working on it.

View on HN

I'm fairly certain I was able to just 'aptitude install gitit' on debian stable, edit the config file and 'gitit -f gitit.conf' to be up and running.

Exactly. You should be able to do that. The libs that come from apt should be compatible with the applications that come from apt.

But you cannot grab some software sources from dev repos (e.g. git clone gitit) and then install the required libs from apt and expect it to work. It may work if all the dependency libraries are very mature and stable, but that's not usually the case.

All distros are also volunteer projects who are happy to accept packaging submissions from the community.

And I don't understand the "new major change" bit. I have base 4.3, apparently gitit won't run without 4.4. Are you seriously saying that's a version bump comparable to Python 3?

> All distros are also volunteer projects who are happy to accept packaging submissions from the community.

You, sir, greatly underestimate the efforts that distro package maintainers do.

> I have base 4.3, apparently gitit won't run without 4.4. Are you seriously saying that's a version bump comparable to Python 3?

No, that version bump is not as significant. But it may introduce incompatibilities nevertheless. These may or may not be applicable to gitit, but that is determined what gitit defines in their cabal build files.

Sometimes these minor changes can be worked around by modifying the cabal build files of the project you're building with relaxed version numbers, but it works only in the simplest of cases.

> You, sir, greatly underestimate the efforts that distro package maintainers do.

Given that I've actually been paid to do exactly that professionally, I assure you that I'm not. But to be blunt: if you're not willing to ship usable software, don't claim to be shipping a "Platform". If you want to play in your unstable garden forever, that's great. The rest of us just won't care.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com