RFC: include a cabal-install executable in future GHC releases

[Johan Tibell]

We could offer OS X and Linux binaries in addition to the Windows binaries
already downloaded on the cabal home page (http://www.haskell.org/cabal/)
if someone could commit to building them.

Aside: Right now building the Windows binaries is a very ad-hoc process (I
email Mikhail who has a Windows machine and ask him to build one). I'm not
very keen to make the process even slower, given that that will mean I will
make fewer cabal releases. Ideally the binaries could be produced on a
build bot. The very least we should have the Makefile in the cabal repo
being able to create the binary in a reproducible manner.

-- Johan



On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Ganesh Sittampalam <ganesh at earth.li>wrote:

> I feel this blurs the roles of GHC and the Platform.
>
> Can't the cabal-install that comes with the Platform can be used with a
> later GHC installation? If that's correct, then the only use case that
> this proposal covers is someone who wants to use a bleeding edge GHC and
> no other version on a new machine. A separate binary distribution of
> cabal-install should be more than adequate for that and it avoids
> coupling GHC to other things.
>
> So a weak -1.
>
>
> On 20/01/2014 00:02, Carter Schonwald wrote:
> > Hey everyone,
> >
> > I'd like to propose that GHC releases 7.8.1 onwards include a
> > cabal-install (aka cabal) executable, but not include the library deps
> > of cabal-install that aren't already distributed with ghc.(unless ghc
> > should have those deps baked in, which theres very very good reasons not
> > to do.).
> >
> > currently if someone wants just a basic haskell install of the freshest
> > ghc  they have to install a ghc bindist, then do a boostrap build of
> > cabal-install by hand (if they want to actually get anything done :) ).
> >
> > This is not a human friendly situation for folks who are new to haskell
> > tooling, but want to try out haskell dev on a server style vm or the
> like!
> >
> > point being: It'd be great for haskell usability (and egads amounts of
> > config time, even by seasoned users) the ghc bindists / installers
> > included a cabal-install binary
> >
> > thoughts?
> > -Carter
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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> >
>
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