[Haskell-beginners] Installing packages in Ubuntu

[Magnus Therning]

On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Glurk <streborg at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a beginner to both Cabal and Linux.
> I'm a bit confused as to whether I need to be using Cabal when installng
> packages.
>
> I'm running Ubuntu 9.10, and from the Synaptic Package Manager, I can select
> various Haskell packages to install - will this install the package correctly,
> or is there something I need to do in Cabal as well ?
>
> Thanks ! :)

IMNSHO, cabal (the tool) is primarily for systems with broken, or
non-existing package managers (read Windows).  For other systems,
including Ubuntu, people should use the native packaging system as far
as possible, only reverting to cabal when that fails (for whatever
reason).

So, in short, use Synaptic until you come to a situation where you
need something that isn't packaged for Ubuntu yet.  Even then I'd
suggest you first check for a source package in Debian.  Only if
everything else fails should you reach for cabal.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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