[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 09:16 +0100, Simon Marlow 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.
> 
> 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.

Indeed. I wholly agree.

Duncan