[Haskell-cafe] hellno - a somewhat different approach to tackling cabal hell

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Hell yeah!

Looks like a nice approach.

On Sun 02 Sep 2012 19:25:08 BST, Danny B wrote:
> Like many of us, I've suffered from cabal dependency hell and sought relief.
>
> I wasn't exactly happy with sandboxes - because using per-project ones
> meant package duplication and shared sandboxes suffer from the same
> issues as the GHC package database itself, i.e. reinstalls can break
> other projects, etc. So I wrote hellno, which is so named because that's
> the expression one makes when seeing cabal hell suddenly manifest itself
> and that's also the expression one makes upon encountering yet ANOTHER
> cabal wrapper.
>
> To quote the README:
>> Generally, with hellno you'll get the same result as for blowing away your user
>> package database and doing a nice clean install but without having to recompile
>> everything and with ability to easily revert back and change between projects.
>
> Hellno works by keeping all the compiled packages to itself in a
> database, so that when you ask it to bring in the dependencies of a
> project, it will use the precompiled packages if available or install
> the deps and save them for later reuse.
>
> Hellno puts symlinks in the user package database pointing to packages
> in its storage to make them visible. Mutating the user db is hardly
> elegant, although shouldn't result in much trouble.
>
> It's been working fine for me, so I figured it may be useful to others.
> You can get hellno from GitHub:
> https://github.com/db81/hellno
>
> I don't mean to say that sandboxing is inherently bad or should not be
> used, but I guess it's better to consider more than one way.
>
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