[Haskell-cafe] uninstalling libraries

[Ben Franksen]

I recommend cabal new-build. I am using it ever since it came out and
never looked back. You can have the cake and eat it.

Yes it's not yet fully stable and every once in a while I have to remove
dist-newstyle and do a clean re-build. This happens mostly when I pull
changes to the cabal file and is still *much* faster than re-building
all dependencies.

Cheers
Ben

Am 14.11.2017 um 02:39 schrieb Evan Laforge:
> To be fair, it's not absolute.  I have found cabal sandbox useful to
> compile things thing tons of dependencies, like pandoc.  And if I
> wanted to contribute to something with out of date version
> requirements (and the first step is not helping them upgrade, for
> whatever reason), then surely I'd go ahead and make a sandbox for
> that.  It hasn't really come up though.  I'm certainly not trying to
> push this as The Solution, that's a bigger windmill than just
> uninstalls :)
> 
> On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 4:56 PM, Dan Burton <danburton.email at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The point at which I find a "single version policy" difficult is when I'm
>> trying to contribute to disparate packages or projects, with differing
>> maintainers and version requirements. One person wants to use the latest,
>> while another hasn't upgraded yet. Sandboxing is the only sane way to work
>> on two such projects simultaneously.
>>
>> But if you, like Google, have enough control over all the projects worked on
>> in order to dictate a single version policy, then that approach can
>> certainly have its benefits. I'm not sure many people consider themselves in
>> such a position, hence the pervasive assumption that sandboxing will be
>> involved.
>>
>>
>> On Nov 13, 2017 14:45, "Evan Laforge" <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
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