[Haskell-cafe] How outdated is Hugs?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 21:41 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:

> I have tried to maintain Hugs compatibility in all my libraries, but I
> must admit I am dropping it for many, due to various problems.  It is
> mainly that libraries I use from others haven't even been tried with
> Hugs or have weird issues:

[..]

> Things would be a lot better if the libraries would just be
> maintained.


It would be a lot easier if cabal-install worked for hugs then testing
would be much simpler for most developers. However at the moment hugs
does not provide the installed package information files that
cabal-install needs to be able to track installed packages and plan new
installations. Cabal does install these files for new packages, but the
hugs distribution does not include them for the core packages that it
ships.

So a new hugs release with more up-to-date libraries and support for
cabal-install would make it much easier for everyone else to check their
packages with hugs. Also, the default per-user library path that hugs
searches is not to everone's liking $HOME/lib/hugs/packages.
Unfortunately if cabal does not put things there by default then hugs
will not be able to find them. If anyone has suggestions that'd be
great. Perhaps we could ask for hugs to read its default search path
from ~/.hugs/some-config-file

Duncan