[Haskell-cafe] Nix for Hackage/Cabal

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-07-06 at 16:47 +0200, apfelmus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>    http://nix.cs.uu.nl/index.html
> 
> "Nix is a purely functional package manager. This means that it treats
> packages like values in purely functional programming languages such as
> Haskell - they are built by functions that don't have side-effects, and
> they never change after they have been built."
> 
> To me, it sounds like the ideal solution to package/make/build
> management in general and Cabal/Hackage/Cabal-install in particular.
> After all, compilation is just a _pure_ function
> 
>   compile :: Source -> Dependencies -> Object
> 
> So, the suggestion is to use Nix for Hackage/Cabal. This way, we get
> package installation/deinstallation for free. I didn't look into it, but
> it seems that the package description language can express most content
> from .cabal files and I guess that it even eliminates the need for most
> of Cabal's functionality like finding compilers and such.

I was under the impression that it didn't work on Windows. From another
quick look at the website, it looks like that's right. Does anybody
happen to know otherwise?

Duncan