[Haskell-cafe] Re: Problems with Haskell Platform

[Pete Chown]

Dominic Steintiz wrote:

> I seem to be in some sort package dependency hell (which I thought the
> Haskell Platform did away with).
>
> I install ghc using my package manager (I'm on opensuse).

I was just thinking, interactions between Cabal and the distribution 
package manager could get worse, as shared Haskell libraries become more 
common.  Suppose a distribution ships a package 'foo', but not a package 
'bar' which depends on it.  The 'foo' package includes shared libraries. 
  The user now installs 'bar' using Cabal.  This causes Cabal to install 
'foo' (because it is a dependency) and it won't use the distribution's 
package manager.

If 'foo' is built as a shared library, programs built by the user will 
not work for anyone else.  Other users will have the distribution's 
build of 'foo' rather than Cabal's build.  If 'foo' is built statically, 
it's not quite so bad, but the user will not get the benefits that could 
come from using shared libraries.

Pete