RFC: include a cabal-install executable in future GHC releases

[Henning Thielemann]

Am 22.01.2014 09:57, schrieb Herbert Valerio Riedel:
> On 2014-01-21 at 20:22:48 +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
>> I feel this blurs the roles of GHC and the Platform.
>
> IMO, that's a weak argument, as the roles are already blurred:

> GHC comes with `haddock`, `hp2ps`, and `hpc` executables which could be
> provided by the HP instead.

At least haddock is bound to the specific GHC version. I don't know how 
strict is the relation between hp2ps and hpc and GHC. Cabal-install on 
the other hand can be exchanged.

 > Moreover, GHC ships with a set of base
> libraries (which, and thus effectively GHC forces 20 or so packages
> (fixed to specific package versions) into the HP and takes away
> authority from the HP release process.

Yes, that's unfortunate. My prefered solution would be that GHC is only 
shipped with package 'ghc', whereas 'base', 'Cabal', 'containers' et.al. 
can be built by the user.


Btw. on Debian/Ubuntu I can install cabal-install from the distribution 
repositories. With this one I can build newer versions of cabal-install.