Fixing "breaking packages"

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Duncan, Mark, Simon

Here's another cry of pain: http://fluffynukeit.com/2013/02/reflections-after-a-hard-day-in-haskell-gui-land/

"Cabal is a frustratingly constraining tool.  Far too frequently I encountered packages that, when trying to install, would say installing this package will break a dozen others.  If not that, then I often would be notified that the dependencies could not be resolved. "

What is frustrating that we KNOW how to fix this, don't we?  (Allow multiple installations of package P-3.2.5, each depending on different versions of its dependencies.)  We just need to liberate enough effort to do it.

Indeed, more people seem to be joining in with GHC/Cabal these days.  How hard would it be to write a detailed description of the implementation changes needed to support side-by-side installations, and project-manage a group to do it?

Simon
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