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

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 21 Apr 2009, at 11:36 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:

> "Richard O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>> Some of the right questions are
>>  - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have
>>    <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have
>>    administrator access to?
>>
> Irrelevant.

How van the question that is the very heart of this thread
be "irrelevant"?

This is precisely the situation I'm in, and it's precisely
the class of users I'm arguing for.

I'm encouraged by the constructive suggestions of package
tools (nix, portage) that are said to address some of these
issues.  Except of course that I have to install them first...
>

> OTOH, quickly checking whether the user has write permissions to / and
> failing with "you need root right to do that, did you mean to call  
> this
> script with --user?" instead of failing with access denied errors is a
> Good Thing.[1]

I think we can agree on this.
>
>
> Echoing "binaries were installed in $HOME/.cabal/bin", and checking  
> the
> user's $PATH and displaying a warning if that directory isn't in it is
> a Good Thing, too. I guess it's also the main problem those not
> literate in UNIX have with cabal.

I think we can agree on this too.