[Haskell-cafe] compiler management for Haskell a la RVM?

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Mar 16, 2010, at 20:59 , Mark Wotton wrote:
> Do we have any similar system for ghc/cabal? I quite frequently find  
> myself switching between 6.10 and 6.12 for various things, and it's  
> always a bit painful to get your environment up to speed. Is there a  
> golden road for this stuff, or do the compiler hackers here just  
> munge the PATH?


Both the system and user package databases handle multiple compiler  
versions, and Cabal inherits this so should do the right thing for the  
most part.

The GHC environment I've assembled for campus machines installs  
versioned commands (including adding versions to the commands that  
lack them), then a script uses the machine configuration db to install  
symlinks for the default version.  This is slightly less convenient  
than using $PATH, and I may alter it to allow PATH munging and then  
use something like http://modules.sf.net/ to make it easier for  
users.  (I have been reworking our Perl setup to allow for this, and  
would like to do the same for Python, Ruby, and some of the commercial  
packages for which we provide multiple versions.)

Admittedly this still requires manually installing libraries in all  
available compiler versions.  I'm not aware of any automated way to  
deal with this, but then I'm not aware of one for Perl or Python  
either (both of which we handle similarly to GHC).

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH


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