[Haskell-cafe] Hackage -> MacPorts?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2008-09-04 at 12:09 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> > 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.

Yeah, I know. It's really a limitation of systems like Gentoo. Gentoo's
position is that you should not encode things like this into the package
name and provides a 'slotting' mechanism to allow multiple versions,
however it's not quite expressive enough to slot on the haskell
implementation and still get all the lib deps right.

> 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.

Right. And yes, Nix can do everything because it's jolly cunning and
takes the functional/persistent approach.

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

Debian does, again by encoding the haskell implementation name into the
package name. I think arch only provides libraries for ghc.

Ducan