[Haskell-cafe] Library Process (was Building "production stable" software in Haskell)

[brad clawsie]

On Tue, Sep 18, 2007 at 07:24:08PM +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
> Although this statement might be a bit heretical on this list, I'll have to 
> repeat myself again that Cabal, cabal-install, cabal-whatever 
> will *never* be the right tool for the end user to install Haskell 
> packages on platforms with their own packaging systems like RPM   

this is a valid point. personally i only install cabal packages as
--user and most tool-specific package managers (cpan etc) tend to
offer this as an option. 

cabal is still necessary. it fills the gap where most OS package
platforms won't provide support. even on the most supported platform
(.deb for debian and ubuntu i presume), you still likely only get
about 20% of what is in hackage on your system. what about everything
else? i would prefer to have cabal in place of "make install".

the only plausible solution i can see is generated OS packages
(i.e. hackage hosts .deb, .rpm, and bsd packages on its own). this is
likely the only realistic approach, but also periodically creates
breakage too, particularly if the OS one day creates its own blessed
packages.

i would be willing to look into auto-generating freebsd packages,
might be a fun project.