[Agda] Dependencies for compiling agda, principal question

[Iain Lane]

Hello,

This mail (from Randy) didn't make it to the list.

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 03:07:23PM +0100, Darin Morrison wrote:
>
>On 20 Apr 2010, at 14:38, Randy Pollack wrote:
>
>> Darin Morrison writes:
>>>
>>> Is there some reason you feel the current release version (2.2.6)
>>> is not already accessible enough?
>>
>> Yes.  The Ubuntu packages are built for 10.04-beta rather than 9.10
>> (still the official release).  Same thing James and David are saying:
>> to use Agda one has to screw around with beta software.

That's somewhat unfair; you are conflating distribution release policies 
with the upstream (Agda) policies.

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has Agda 2.2.4, as that is what was available 
in October 2009.

Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) will have Agda 2.2.6, as that is what is 
available now.

It may be possible to provide best-effort updated packages through 
Ubuntu's backporting procedure. If there is demand (let me know), I'll 
try and do this for future releases. But the main point is that by 
installing a release of Ubuntu, you are essentially taking a snapshot of 
what was available at the time of release. This is also the case for all 
of the other software on your machine.

>I have to disagree.
>
>The source tarball of 2.2.6 and the hackage package (both of which are the recommended way of installing Agda AFAIK) should work perfectly fine with the current Haskell platform and do not require one to "screw around with beta software."
>
>The Debian/Ubuntu packages may be a different story.  I don't know who maintains them (Iain?), but I believe they are not "officially" supported.  (I'm sure Ulf or Nils will correct me if I'm wrong.)

They aren't.

>
>Haskell and related software are typically poorly supported on most *nix distributions and their package management systems, so it's not surprising that this may affect Agda as well.  In my experience, trying to install software that uses Haskell on such systems is more of a headache than it is worth and I recommend compiling from the source and installing locally instead (or using Hackage).

Actually I think that we have recently got Haskell on Debian and Ubuntu 
into a pretty nice and usable state. Lucid and Squeeze will have greatly 
improved Haskell support. If you find problems, please either file bugs 
or contact the Debian team directly on debian-haskell at lists.debian.org.

In Lucid, you will be able to issue the single command

   # apt-get install agda-mode agda-stdlib

To get a working Agda 2.2.6 installation with the standard library 
version 0.3. I think that's pretty well the best you could ask for.

>[...]

Thanks,
Iain