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

[Don Stewart]

mle+cl:
> 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.

I encourage *strongly* the Debian community to package up hackage
packages natively, as we have done on Gentoo and Arch.

(This can be automated, in fact, see cabal2arch).

cabal-install will work on any system. If you have particular distro
requirements, consider distro-specific package tools.

-- Don