[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Platform 2013.2.0.0 64bit.pkg

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 06/13/2013 02:13 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> My original problem was that I wanted to load a particular set of
> packages using 'cabal install'.  It didn't work (cabal install issues)
> and while the maintainer reacted promptly and helpfully, cabal
> kept on trying to install the wrong version.
> 
> Part of the problem was that blasting away ~/.cabal and ~/Library/Haskell
> wasn't enough:  it's necessary to blast away ~/.ghc as well (which I had
> forgotten existed and of course never saw).
> 
> * It would be handy if 'uninstall-hs' had an option, say
> * uninstall-hs --user
> * so that a user could in one step make it as if they had never
> * used the Haskell Platform.
> 
> (Sigh.  Changes to the GHC command line interface since 7.0 have
> broken one of the packages I used to have installed, and the
> maintainer's e-mail address doesn't work any more.  And sometimes
> it seems as if every time I install anything with cabal something
> else breaks.)
> 
> PS. Earlier today cabal gave me some confusing messages which
> turned out to mean 'GSL isn't installed'.  Non-Haskell dependencies
> could be explained a little more clearly.
> 

This doesn't offer an immediate solution to your problem, but as of
right now, the best set of "blessed" Haskell packages can be found in
the gentoo-haskell[1] overlay.

You can use Gentoo's portage package manager and the overlay on many
operating systems (OSX included) via the gentoo-prefix[2] project, which
builds you an entire Gentoo system in e.g. ~/prefix. It's then easy to
get packages added to the overlay, and tested against the rest of the
packages in Gentoo (which is what everything will be compiled against).

There's also support in portage for automatically rebuilding packages
whose dependencies have been broken by an upgrade, which prevents a huge
amount of breakage. Some good docs on getting a Haskell system up and
running on prefix would be a big help for anyone who wants an ecosystem
that will work for a few years.

Right now the documentation for prefix isn't great, but as I understand
it the project docs are going to be moved to the Gentoo wiki, and us
mere mortals will be able to update the instructions. Right now you need
CVS access, and nobody knows how the documentation XML nonsense works.

Burcin Erocal has an interesting project called lmonade[3] which
simplifies this for other projects, so it doesn't need to be painful.


[1] https://github.com/gentoo-haskell/
[2] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/
[3] http://www.lmona.de/