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

[Achim Schneider]

Edward Middleton <emiddleton at bebear.net> wrote:

> > 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.
>
Not the maintainers, but the tool. Portage doesn't install stuff if it
would overwrite other things, records changes to files in e.g. /etc to
be merged later (interactively, with diffs), and records every file it
ever installed by having the package install itself in
/var/portage/<package>/<version>. You are _completely_busted_ if your
install script doesn't support that: The script runs sandboxed.

Portage even registers every installed package into an empty ghc
package database, and merges them later. It knows what it does.

I can switch between different versions of packages, or different
implementations of the same functionality (say, java-sun vs.
java-blackdown) with eselect.

In short: Don't write your own install scripts, you're bound to get it
wrong, and/or be vastly inferior, compared to portage.

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