[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release

[Edward Middleton]

Richard O'Keefe wrote:
> On 21 Apr 2009, at 2:10 pm, Edward Middleton wrote:
>> Using non-standard installation methods makes it harder for package
>> maintainers to package the application and suggests you haven't taken
>> any care / don't care about making global installation safe.
>
> I'm sorry, there is no such animal as "safe" global installation,
> in the sense of "download this one package and do what it says."

Well I have been doing that for more then 10 years, it is one of the
functions any decent package management systems is designed to do.

> ghc 6.8.3 is /usr/bin/ghc on my office Mac, but nothing in the world
> prevents there being some other program called ghc that would also
> like to be there.  Only by painstaking verification of a whole
> bunch of applications together can one be confident of "safety".

Well then I guess we agree,  so the question becomes who should do the
painstaking verification.  I think distribution maintainers should do
this, you think end users who can't compile source packages should do this.

Edward