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Comment by masida | Hacker News Reader

What will be the easiest way to get GHC 7.8.1 running alongside the official GHC packages for Debian (specifically Jessie)?

Should I download a package from http://deb.haskell.org/? If so, where can I find 7.8.1?

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You can use these PPAs from our friend, Herbert: https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ghc/

They are packaged for Ubuntu, technically (12.04 Precise) but you can just add the apt-repository line to your `sources.list` and it will work fine, and plenty of people are doing this.

A repository for the STABLE branch will eventually appear on http://deb.haskell.org, but I'm not sure when Joachim will do this.

GHC 7.8 is already packaged in Debian experimental, so if you're running current testing, you may find it easiest to just add sources for experimental and sid, set the default release to testing (so you don't upgrade anything else), and then install GHC 7.8 directly. You'll end up upgrading a pile of Haskell packages to versions from experimental, but mostly not the rest of your system.

The binary distributions install alongside your system packages or other bindists quite nicely (they might overwrite the /usr/bin/ghc symlink, but that's it) and you can select which ghc version you want to use when using cabal with the `-w` flag. Each will keep a separate package db, etc. So be bold!

Thank you for your comment. I've ended up installing 7.8.1 from the binary distributions from the GHC site: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_7_8_1

As easy as:

  tar -xJvf ghc-7.8.1-i386-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz
  cd ghc-7.8.1
  ./configure --prefix=/opt/ghc-7.8.1
  make install

That is maintained by an active ghc contributor, so should be safe to use!

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