[Haskell-beginners] coming to grips with hackage

[tam at hiddenrock.com]

Thanks!

pete

On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 11:48:52PM -0500, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 10:29 PM, <tam at hiddenrock.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how to work with Hackage in the
> > context of a Linux distribution that already has its own package management
> > situation.  Between distribution-provided packages containing Haskell
> > programs
> > and/or libraries, system-wide cabal installs, user-specific cabal installs,
> > and cabal sandboxes, I can't seem to work out how the hackage/cabal
> > architects
> > intend people (ie, me) to juggle things.
> >
> 
> This is not a Hackage-specific issue; you will run into it with any
> language ecosystem, and every language ecosystem has its own mechanisms for
> dealing with it (usually involving some form of sandboxing). Indeed, some
> languages pretty much require those mechanisms: all too often, you need a
> separate rvm sandbox for multiple Ruby applications....
> 
> The general rule is that if you're just looking to install a few things
> available from OS packages and are not doing development, use the OS
> packages; otherwise, install just enough to be able to use cabal to install
> stuff. Although this also may vary: in many cases you will want to install
> the Platform libraries from your OS because you should really only have one
> version installed and it should generally be the "blessed" stable version.
> But if you're [say] intending to work with bleeding edge Yesod, then you
> probably want to only install ghc and cabal-install from the OS.
> 
> Anyway, this question is why Haskell has hsenv, cabal-dev, and cabal
> sandboxes; Ruby has rvm, Python has virtualenv, and Perl has perlbrew, and
> other languages have their own mechanisms to deal with the same problems.
> And pkg-config is (de facto and for the moment) the solution C and C++ use,
> attacking it from a different direction.
> 
> -- 
> brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
> allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
> unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net

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