Cabal woe

[amindfv at mailbox.org]

On Tue, Jul 09, 2024 at 05:07:07PM +0300, Oleg Grenrus wrote:
> 
> On 9.7.2024 16.35, Simon Peyton Jones wrote:
> > Would it be possible to support the simple story above, as well?
> 
> TL;DR the GHC developers (e.g. you, richard, sebastian) are virtually the
> only group of people who want to invoke GHC manually [...]

Genuinely curious, what makes you say this?

My only data is anecdata, but I've talked to quite a lot of people who miss the old days of `cabal install`-ing a package (particularly if it requires tweaking flags) and then having it at your fingertips whenever you run GHCi, `runghc`, or GHC. Some packages are so central to our workflows that it's almost like needing to `mkdir foo ; cd foo ; cabal init ; $EDITOR foo.cabal ; cabal repl` to get the Prelude.

Nobody misses the package conflicts that could come from long-term thoughtless default-global installation, but to say that almost nobody wants to invoke GHC manually seems like a major stretch. If we had a cleaner solution, I'm willing to bet a lot of people would drop the `cabal init` workflow for everyday tinkering like a hot potato.

Tom

P.S. I've built my own hacks on top of GHC environment files to recapture this way of working, but that's another story.