[Haskell-cafe] uninstalling libraries

[Evan Laforge]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 12:27 PM, Dan Burton <danburton.email at gmail.com> wrote:
> I also lean towards the "you shouldn't be trying to uninstall" mentality.
> But it's worth discussing.
>
> What is the motive for uninstalling? Is it to upgrade to a new version? To
> narrow hoogle search results?  For these, our sandbox tooling should allow
> for upgrades or selective querying without having to manually uninstall. If
> it's just because you want the hard drive space back, then I don't really
> have anything for that.

I'm usually backing out of a version so I can install something else.
I always keep just one version of each library installed.  It's less
clutter, and I never have any question about what package is linked to
what version of what other package.

Maybe it's not the official way to do things, but it's probably the
reason I've never encountered cabal hell.  Back in the day, of course,
it was the only option.  Nowadays we have cabal sandbox, but global
packages are still simpler and more convenient.  Maybe the new cabal
install will improve on the situation, but it seems hard to beat the
convenience, and doesn't provide the guarantee that there's no version
skew anywhere.  But, I'm not the only one with a single version
policy, Google does too.

Anyway, if there's no interest in robust uninstallation, I'll just
continue using my script, with a few extra hacks to avoid deleting
/usr/local/lib.  Except that one hiccup it's actually worked fine for
the last 15 years or so.  For me, making a better API to the package
db than ghc-pkg would probably do well enough.