[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu Haskell

[Magnus Therning]

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 11:25 +0100, Magnus Therning wrote:
>> Playing the devil's advocate I'd say that cabal (not the library
>> Cabal, but the tool cabal in cabal-install) is only needed on systems
>> with pacakge managers that are broken or completely missing (e.g.
>> Windows).  As such cabal is a waste of time and shouldn't have been
>> written at all; on many systems it's of no use, on the ones where it
>> is useful it's a fix at the wrong level.  Somewhat harsh, and not
>> completely in line with my own opinion, but it can be argued that way.
>
> I think they're actually complementary. Sure on Windows it's needed in
> place of a native packaging system, but even on systems like debian it's
> still needed in places. It's needed for packages that are too new or are
> not sufficiently mature or popular to have been packaged yet for the
> distro. There will always be such packages. Of course many ordinary
> users would be able to make do with the subset of packages that are
> provided by the distro and that's great.

Yes, that would actually be my opinion as well, when my devil hat is off.

When putting it back on again though I'd say that the distro's own
package manager should be used also in this case, e.g. new versions of
stuff from Hackage should go into Debian experimental.

Taking the hat off again, cabal-install strikes me as a lighter
approach and more suited for bleeding-edge things.  On top of that
it's X-distro and X-platform.  All good things!

Enough of this schizophrenia.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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