[Haskell-cafe] Global Package Install

[Ben Franksen]

>> cabal -z repl --package QuickCheck --repl-options="whatever"
>> 
>> is more of a pain to type than
>> 
>> ghci "whatever"
>> 
>> and that creating a .cabal file and running "cabal build" is more
>> of a pain than typing "ghc", or is there something fundamental that
>> the "global package database" supports that cabal v2-style does
>> not?
> 
> Maybe it's superficial, but this is the big thing for me, yes. I also
> tend to have long-running ghci sessions, and so I don't always know
> what packages I'll want before launching.
> 
> Some of this is also, for me, philosophical: I don't want anything
> between me and GHC. That is, I want to know exactly what flags are
> being passed to GHC and to be able to control those flags myself. A
> tool that installs libraries should do that, and then get out of the
> way.

I think this amounts to a call for action to fix `cabal install --lib`
(assuming the v2- variant). Indeed when I tried this with cabal-head my
cabal store became unusable, which hasn't happened to me for a very long
time now. (Deleting ~/.cabal/store/ghc-8.2.2 fixed it.)

Cheers
Ben
-- 
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that
cannot be questioned.  -- Richard Feynman