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

[Jason Dusek]

2010/03/16 Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu>:
> 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.

  While I've not worked with it much, Nix seems like a complete,
  well-thought system for building out multi-versioned package
  installations. Have you looked at it? What do you think?

  Finding myself in a similar situation, I wonder if it's not
  ultimately better to leverage the work of the Nix team,
  instead of building a "simpler" system for Haskell (and then
  later for Ruby and then...).

--
Jason Dusek