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

[Simon Marlow]

Sven Panne wrote:
> On Tuesday 18 September 2007 09:44, Dominic Steinitz wrote:
>> This discussion has sparked a question in my mind:
>>
>> What is the process for the inclusion of modules / packages in ghc, hugs
>> and other compilers & interpreters?
> 
> Personal interest of the people working on GHC et. al. ;-)
> 
>> I thought the master plan was that less would come with the compiler /
>> interpreter and the user would install packages using cabal. [...]
> 
> 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 (the same holds for other systems, I 
> just use RPM as an example here).

I think you're identifying a non-problem here.  Cabal was never intended to 
be used instead of the system's packaging tools for installing packages 
globally on the system, if you look back through the original Cabal design 
discussions you'll see this.  We recognised the critical importance of 
working with, rather than around, emerge/ports/RPM/apt/whatever.

Nowadays from a Cabal package you get make an RPM, a Windows installer, and 
  the Gentoo folks have imported the entirety of Hackage.  This is how it's 
meant to work.

Cheers,
	Simon