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 :

haskell-curl - Haskell bindings for libcurl (already in Debian unstable).

haskell-bzlib - Haskell bindings for libbz2 (still in the new package queue).

haskell-unixutils - An interface between Haskell and Unix-like operating systems (still in the new package queue).

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