On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 10:47 PM, Bardur Arantsson
On 2014-05-12 15:47, Magnus Therning wrote: [--snip--]
The same goes for me. Occasionally I revert to installing a package for the local user only, but not even then do I use `cabal install` to do that, I prefer running `./Setup.hs configure,build,install` myself.
I do mean to look into using `cabal` myself at some point, because I keep on hearing good things about it. So far every time I've tried it I've run into something weird, most recently it was trying to install an older version of a lib than was needed, and I already had the newer version installed on my system too. A lot of terrifyingly clever people swear by it though, so there has to be something I'm missing out on!
Gah! Just try it!
All I needed to install build-wrapper (which I think was the inital "problem" package in this thread) was to do
$ mkdir somewhere/buildwrapper $ cd somewhere/buildwrapper $ cabal sandbox init $ cabal install buildwrapper
Add "somewhere/buildwrapper" to $PATH. Bonus points for using "stow" or similar. The key point in the above recipe is to *NOT* have all kinds of libraries installed system-wide (aka. via pacman). It usually works better that way.
Surely you should then `cabal install` the tool so you don't end up with a complete sandbox with every dependency of buildwrapper's in it, no? For some packages you would have to keep the sandbox around and do it your way though, e.g. `pandoc` since it contains both a library and executables.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually used buildwrapper personally, but one assumes that it just acts as an executable and doesn't install things into its own environment or other weird things.
Personally I think `cabal` really shines when doing more serious Haskell development than I do. I never test my Haskell packages on anything other than the GHC that's in [haskell-core], and neither do I test them against any other versions of packages than what's found in [haskell-core]. My Haskell development is completely in my free time and for fun. I think that if I ever am lucky enough find myself using Haskell professionally I'd quickly see more use in what `cabal` has to offer. /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus