[Haskell-cafe] Hackage -> MacPorts?

David Menendez dave at zednenem.com
Thu Sep 4 12:09:33 EDT 2008


On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Duncan Coutts
<duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 17:54 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
>> In my experience thus far, MacPorts feels like a poor match for Cabal.
>> As far as I can tell, you get at most one active installation of a
>> given port, which means you can't use MacPorts to manage packages for
>> multiple Haskell environments (GHC and Hugs, stable GHC and
>> development GHC, etc.), and after a GHC upgrade, any installed Haskell
>> packages will still be installed, even though the new GHC can't see or
>> use them.
>
> That's exactly the same situation as with Gentoo. We provide a
> ghc-updater program that re-installs all the existing libs for the new
> ghc. Gentoo also only provides libs for ghc.

That's more convenient than re-installing all the libs by hand. I
guess that's good enough for non-developer use; someone who just wants
to install a program doesn't need to have more than one version of GHC
installed, for example. It pains me to see the assumption that Haskell
= GHC built in to our distribution methods, though.

RPM apparently handles this by having the library packages install
themselves under new names that include the environment name and
version. I assume Nix can handle multiple Haskell environments.

Does anyone know whether arch linux and debian can handle multiple
Haskell environments?

-- 
Dave Menendez <dave at zednenem.com>
<http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>


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