[Haskell-cafe] Re: Damnit, we need a CPAN.

[Chaddaï Fouché]

2008/5/30 Achim Schneider <barsoap at web.de>:
> I already was pleasantly surprised when discovering cabal-install, I
> think it deserves some more prominence, or even integration into cabal
> itself, to make everyone aware of the fact that there's such a thing as
> automatic installation and tempt people to make it work.

I completely agree, cabal-install is very nice, and should be more widely known.

> CPAN, of course, makes its life a lot easier by not caring about
> outside dependencies at all: You can install GTK bindings without
> having GTK installed... which of course does not work with Haskell, as
> things must be linked properly.

Not true : GTK bindings have a C part which needs to be properly
linked as well, you can't install them without GTK on your computer.
On the other hand, CPAN and the make-like tools in Perl are much more
mature and have more functionality than Cabal now (and they're a bit
of a mess too...) and there is often a external dependancies
downloader and installer integrated in packages.
Another truly important difference between CPAN and cabal-install is
the importance of the testing suite, all CPAN tools are geared so that
by default nothing is installed if it doesn't pass its test and
there's always a good number of tests. (So even when external
dependancies don't prevent the module from being build, it won't
install without forcing it)

-- 
Jedaï