[Haskell-cafe] Hackage on Linux

[Jonas Almström Duregård]

> Now, you say it's preferable to use the native package manager where
> possible. I've got one word for you: Windows. You know, the most popular OS
> on the market? The one installed on 98% of all computers world-wide? Guess
> what: no native package manager.

Isn't Windows Installer (MSI) a package manager?

/J

On 22 August 2010 12:41, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
>>
>> Hackage has limited support for distro maintainers to state which
>> packages are available on the distribution.  Last I checked, it required
>> distro maintainers to keep a text file somewhere up to date.
>>
>> Note that not all distributions bother.
>
> Yeah, I figured. I don't see any Debian or OpenSUSE anywhere, and I know
> they do have at least a few pre-built binary packages out there.
>
> It looks as if it's automated for Arch, however. Either that or somebody is
> spending an absurd amount of time keeping it manually up to date.
>
>> (in particular none of us
>> involved with packaging Haskell packages for Gentoo can be bothered;
>> we're slowly cutting back into only keeping packages that will actually
>> be used rather than all and sundry)
>
> Well, I guess you either manually select which packages to convert, or you
> have an automated system convert everything in sight.
>
> This whole observation came about because I noticed that some (but not all)
> of my own packages have ended up on Arch, despite being of almost no use to
> anybody. I was just curious as to how that happened.
>
>> As for why using your distro package manager for Haskell packages is
>> preferable:
>>
>> http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-a-package-manager/
>>
>
> Right. So Cabal isn't a package manager because it only manages Haskell
> packages? Not sure I agree with that definition. (It also has a laundry list
> of problems that can and should be fixed, but won't be.)
>
> I actually spent quite a while trying to figure out what the purpose of
> Cabal *is*. It's not like it's hard to download a bunch of Haskell source
> code and utter "ghc --make Foo". So why do we even need Cabal in the first
> place? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that registering a library
> manually is so excruciatingly hard that we actually need a tool to automate
> the process. (Obviously when I first started using Haskell, I was mainly
> interested in writing runnable programs, not libraries.) Cabal can also run
> Haddock for you, which is quite hard. But it wasn't until cabal-install came
> along that I even realised that Cabal could track and resolve dependencies.
> (The fact that it doesn't track installed executables is news to me.)
>
> If nothing else, I think that "what Cabal is" should be documented much more
> clearly. It took me a hell of a long time to figure this out.
>
> Now, you say it's preferable to use the native package manager where
> possible. I've got one word for you: Windows. You know, the most popular OS
> on the market? The one installed on 98% of all computers world-wide? Guess
> what: no native package manager.
>
> Actually, we have tools that automatically convert Cabal packages to Debian
> packages or RPMs or whatever. I think there could be some milage in a tool
> that builds Windows installers. (The problem, of course, is that you have to
> be able to *build* the library on Windows first!) You would of course then
> have all kinds of fun and games with dependency tracking...
>
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