[Haskell-cafe] Re: databases in Haskell & type-safety

[John Goerzen]

Xie Hanjian wrote:
> * John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> [2009-01-13 12:37:45 -0600]:
> 
> Redmine requires only ruby 1.8.6 and rails 2.1.2, which are both stable
> releases, so I think an upgrade of your ruby stack is very reasonable.

It also requires a newer version of rake than is in Debian.  Not a
problem as such, but you start working with gem install commands (and
their friends), and eventually find that after spending 30 minutes
installing/upgrading stuff, it bombs at the very end saying that some
component needed a newer version of something than is available, and it
can't install that component, so it's left the server hosed -- too new
to run the old version, not ready to accept the new.  Great.

It ought to have checked the dependencies *before* messing with my
system.  And it ought not to have failed mysteriously anyhow.

>> To anyone annoyed with Haskell's library install process: you have no
>> idea how good you have it unless you've tried Ruby and rails.
> 
> Disagree. Rubygems is fairly easy to use. At lease, I can guess how to

It is completely poorly documented on how to gem install something when
you don't have root.  The gem(1) manpage is a joke.  The online help
doesn't help much either.   Turns out there is a magic combination of
undocumented environment variables and documented command-line options
that does it.  Or at least, I *thought* it does it.

The other problem about Rails is that code and data are inseparably
mixed.  It will be just about impossible to install a rails app as a
Debian package because it needs write access to its install directory,
and this stuff is not easily configured to use /usr and /etc as appropriate.

Anyhow, this is a Haskell list, so I'm not going to rant any more about
this here.  I can give you details off-list if you like.  It's touched a
nerve lately.

-- John