[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: cabal and platform-independent haskell installation management (again) (Re: Re: Ubuntu and ghc)

[Ben Franksen]

Darrin Thompson wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:48 PM, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 17:22 +0200, Achim Schneider wrote:
>>
>>> The question, IMHO, seems to be
>>>
>>> "How would a package manager for a posix-compilant kinetic look like?"
>>
>> http://nixos.org/index.html
> 
> How well does that coexist with other OS's? Could I have it manage
> only specific applications in it's store and trust the OS for the
> rest?

Yes. You can install nix (the package manager) under linux (and, I think,
other posix-compiant OS) and use it in parallel with native packages
(.deb, .rpm, whatever). This means you'll get some duplication, since the
nix store contains everything needed to build and run the installed
packages. The nix /package database/ contains not only nix package
descriptions but relies essentially on build-scripts, which are mostly
written in shell. So to use that, you'd have to have a posix-shell on your
system, too.

Cheers
Ben