[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] JustHub 'Sherkin' Release

[Chris Dornan]

> What I meant to ask is: how much time, approximately, did you spend
> working with Nix? 1 hour? 10 hours? 10 days? 10 months?

You know that it is not 10 months, but I do object to your line of questioning.
I have invested a considerable good-faith effort into getting to the
bottom of what
you and Andres have been saying. I am no seasoned expert at Nix but I have
been through the process of installing and using multiple distributions,
and reading around and I have been paying attention to what you have
been saying.

But my time is really quite limited.

I of course know exactly what I have been doing in putting together the JustHub
distribution and while they have some similarities -- mostly around the idea
of allowing multiple tool chains to co-exist; the way they go about it is very
different. And those details are critical in my mind (please note). I also know
that I have been adding things that a generic package manager is most
unlikely to be covering -- because a new tool is provided that tangles
with the existing
tools in a detailed way (e.g., parsing spec files and analysing
package databases
for example).

To take just one example, I provide a mechanism that allows developers
to archive the configuration
of their Haskell  development environment and check it into a source management
system. The developer can check it out on a another system and if the
build process
invokes the recovery mechansim it will automatically rebuild the
environment on the
first run (reporting an error if the required tool chain is not
installed on the system).
Subsequent runs of the build process will merely check that nothing has been
disturbed and proceed straight to the main build process.

Maybe Nix provides such a mechanism -- I don't know. But all attempts
to discover
this and other mechanisms have failed and any hard information that I
come across suggests
that this is unlikely. (Hint: it is mostly concerned with the Haskell
*user* package DB;
I have just expanded on the 'archiving' part of the original
announcement by the way.)

It is a great shame as I like the Nix philsophy and I would like to
see the other distributions
adopt more of its functional philosophy.

But I am out of time. If you will excuse me I would rather wind up
this thread once you have replied
(if you would like to)

Chris