[Haskell-cafe] Can cabal be turned into a package manager?

Ivan Perez ivanperezdominguez at gmail.com
Sun Dec 16 12:10:33 CET 2012


On 12 December 2012 18:16, Bardur Arantsson <spam at scientician.net> wrote:
> On 12/12/2012 06:01 PM, Janek S. wrote:
>
> Well, one big issue is that Linux distribution packagers have control of
> the entire stack. A (hypothetical) Haskell package manager wouldn't.

In Gentoo, there are many package overlays apart from the main
repository. You can add as many as you want (local or remote).

> Typical package managers also restrict you to exactly one version of any
> given package. This can be a severe limitation for developers.

Gentoo's emerge doesn't. It adds a concept called slots, which are
different versions of the same package that can be installed in the
same system without conflict. While this property is true for most
versions of most packages in hackage, it is not necessarily true if
those packages contain executables.



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