[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

[Achim Schneider]

Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:

> Claus Reinke wrote:
> 
> > - i don't want to have to remove anything explicitly, because
> > that would mean bypassing the haskell installation managers
> > - i would want to see a single haskell installation manager
> >    for each system,
> 
> I think that's fundamentally the wrong approach.  We shouldn't have
> to build a "Haskell installation manager".  Would you also want
> installation managers for Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, etc. each with
> their own different user interfaces and feature sets?  I think not -
> you want a single package manager for the whole system from which you
> can install/uninstall libraries for any language.
> 
> This is something that Windows gets completely wrong.  Why do I have
> twelve icons in my status bar all representing little programs that
> are running in the background checking for updates to their own bits
> of software?  Why on earth do I have a Printer Driver Update
> Manager?  And I'd be wondering the same thing about a "Haskell
> installation manager": installation and dependencies are not
> something specific to Haskell.
> 
Well, then there are developers who don't want to do .ebuilds, .rpms
for 20 distributions, .debs for 20 distributions, .cabs... Meaning that
if you have a project with 5 developers using 3 1/2 distributions, you
will have a hard time installing.

Haskell code tends to be platform unspecific, one shouldn't have to
write platform-specific installation code just to make users happy.

You have a point, though, and I wouldn't mind at all cabal-install
being integrated into portage, that is, make portage
_understand_ .cabal files and introduce another field in them that
specifies non-haskell (e.g. gtk) dependencies.

That is: I'd like to see a cabal-install for every system, using native
package management where possible. Aren't there any usable
third-party package managers for windoze? Maybe we can hook properly
into cygwin, though it's surely not meant to support non-binary
packages.

Maybe gentoo should start to do binary releases, too, superseding
debian and any other distribution.

On another approach vector, I wouldn't want to update my Eve client
using portage. It has to check whether there's a patch available before
it connects to the server, anyway, so it can as well update.

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