[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

[Ross Paterson]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 02:22:07PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> As I see it we need both. We need to make it easy to translate cabal
> packages into distro packages. We do have tools to do that at the moment
> for Gentoo, Debian and Fedora. I'm sure they could be improved.
> 
> However we cannot expect all distros (esp Windows) to have all packages
> that are on hackage at all times. That's where it makes sense to have a
> tool like cabal-install as a secondary package manager. There's also the
> fact that most distro package managers do not handle unprivileged
> per-user installations very well.

cabal-install probably needs extra features to work in this way.
If you ask it to install a package and its prerequisites, each of
those packages will either be
(1) already installed,
(2) absent but available from the native package manager,
(3) available from hackage.
In the second case you'd probably want to break out of cabal-install to
install the pre-packaged ones before building the new ones.