[Haskell-cafe] real haskell difficulties (at least for me)

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Don Stewart wrote:

> Well, the number one thing is to use Cabal and the cabal-install tool.
> That is the simplest way to avoid headaches.

I'm sure cabal  works very  well for many people, but for anyone who
has used Debian based distributions for some time,  cabal really
does seem like a backward step.

For instance, I regularly develop on 6 machines; personal laptop,
home desktop, 2 work desktops and 2 work build machines.

At work, the main output of my development work is Debian packages
(which get installed on hundreds of machines), and the Debian packages
I create have build depends on whatever compilers and libraries are
required to build them. We also have a build bot that runs nightly
in a clean chroot for each package so that build depends can  be
verified to be correct.

However, if I install compilers or libraries using cabal there is
no package to build depend on, breaking a system which currently
works very, very  well for all the code we build in C, C++ and
Ocaml.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
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"Arguing that Java is better than C++ is like arguing that
grasshoppers taste better than tree bark." -- Thant Tessman