[Haskell-cafe] Fwd: Compatibility etiquette for apps, with cabal sandboxes and `stack`

[Paolo Giarrusso]

On 29 November 2015 at 21:46, Michael Orlitzky <michael at orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 11/29/2015 02:39 PM, Omari Norman wrote:
>>
>> So there's a distribution out there where end users pull source from
>> Hackage, pull source for every dependency, and then build it all with
>> GHC?  If they're not doing what distributors like Debian does--building
>> binaries--then what's the point of distributing at all?

> Gentoo, Nix, and FreeBSD all have tools that will convert a
> hackage package into a distribution package automatically.

> I'm not saying you need to rely on e.g. Debian upstream to create
> packages for you (I certainly don't), but you do need to have "system"
> packages for everything installed. This actually isn't very hard with
> those automated tools I mentioned earlier.

OK, that might be a (somewhat) reasonable alternative to using
`cabal-install` or `stack` as a package manager —  for users of those
distros only. I know the mantra `cabal` is not a package manager, and
that usually read as "`cabal` doesn't want to support its users'
needs".
I'm on OS X + Homebrew though.

Also, as long as you just want to upgrade, a working `cabal upgrade`
would be enough (and maybe within reach after the upcoming cabal
changes); `stack upgrade-all` could also do the job. Bigger problems
are removing packages and intermediate build products.

-- 
Paolo G. Giarrusso - Ph.D. Student, Tübingen University
http://ps.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/team/giarrusso/