[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

[Simon Marlow]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 11:33 +0100, Simon Marlow 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.
> 
> 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.

Well, that's true.  I guess what I'm really objecting to in Claus's message 
is the implication that we should always use a Haskell Installation 
Manager, even on systems with good built-in package management.

Yes, I agree we need good support for managing packages for the other 
scenarios: no system package manager, home-directory installs, no 
pre-prepared system package.  I just don't want whatever provision we make 
for these cases to replace the system package manager for global package 
installs on systems where that is well supported.

Cheers,
	Simon