[Haskell-cafe] Experiments in Haskell Packaging

[Chris Dornan]

Hi Ryan,

Ryan Grant [mailto:rgrant at rgrant.org] said:

> Are packages cabal-installed using --global?

The packages that come with a compiler or Haskell Platform are installed
--global. Every other package is installed with cabal, by default into the
user's space.

> Is it mostly reliant on cabal or cabal-dev?

It works with cabal. I have not tested interworking with cabal-dev yet.
(There is a big overlap in the functionality of course.)

> How easily can I upgrade cabal?
>  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5380888/cabal-install-and-debian

The stackoverflow discussion seems a little confused in that 'cabal update'
just updates the local cache of package headers from the server, not any of
the installed packages.

But I am using the latest version of cabal-install (0.10.2), compiled with
cabal-1.10.1.0 library (from March rather than June's cabal-1.10.2.0).

Users should never have to build their own cabal-install, but just keep up
to date with the distro. If users should need to use their own private Cabal
builds for whatever reason we will provide a wiki page showing them how to
do it.

> Can the idea be extended to OSX, as well?

I see no reason why not. The idea behind my post was really to say that we
should be doing this with all distros.

I will be making the hub sources available through hackage/github when beta
testing is complete (but sooner if demand dictates). Folks can install it on
their own systems and hook in their own GHC and HP builds. Best of all folks
can make it available in other Haskell distros.

The interesting question is whether anyone else decides to structure their
distros in the same way as the justhub distro. That  is the real challenge!

> How does this strategy relate to the Nix package manager?
>  http://nixos.org/nix/

In a sense the philosophy is similar because I am arguing that we shouldn't
be updating distributions, just adding to them. In that sense it is a
functional philosophy. But after that 30,000 foot observation the comparison
diverges as far as I can see.

Great questions!

Thanks,

Chris