cabal-install rebooted?

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 09/09/2015 12:22 AM, Gershom B wrote:
> That _does_ look simpler!
> 
> However, I think there are multiple efforts underway towards the
> nix-style stuff. We had a GSoC on that for example. And in that
> workflow, if it all works out properly, then we end up with a
> situation where since the general-user-db has no conflicts, then
> sandboxes are the tools that become generally not required.
> 
> So I would be quite hesitant about moving things in the other direction...
> 

I do see some advantages to having sandboxes still, namely isolation of
the binaries into a single directory that you can put into $PATH, but
I'm assuming/hoping there's some way to handle that in nix-style
cabal/cabal-install as well. (If that turns out to be wrong, I imagine a
middle-of-the-road approach here would be to just have a single package
database and treat it as a simple cache of all the binaries ever
compiled and we could still keep sandboxing for binaries and such..That
might also nicely solve the problem of redudant compilation which
happens with sandboxes now.)

Just out of curiousity, when is the GSoC deadline?

FWIW, I'd also be happy if sandboxes could be scrapped (as being
unnecessary) rather than the other way round. The main point of this
execercise was to show how much simpler things *could* be, if we really
want them to. (I think cabal-install *needs* to become a lot simpler if
it's to be in any way maintainable and extendable.)

Regards,