Alson Kemp
A question for the group: Where should cabal-install's various files go?
Note: None of the cabal-install files is dependent on a particular version of Cabal or GHC, so the files do not need to be stored in versioned-directories (e.g. Cabal-1.1.5 or Cabal-1.1.5/ghc-6.4.2).
Files: server.list - one line config file with the Hackage server location, basically never modified; package.list - the listing of packages available on the Hackage server; packages/ - the directory in which all of the downloaded packages are stored.
Options: 1) Proper: /etc/server.list,
Definitely!
/var/local/lib/cabal-install/package.list, /var/local/lib/cabal-install/packages/. A bit dogmatic and I'm not sure how it maps onto non-*nix systems, but it's the Right Thing to do on *nix.
I don't know about /var/local. There's nothing in that directory on my Debian system. /var/lib maybe, or /var/cache.
2) Easy: everything goes in $lib-prefix/cabal-install. Isn't the prettiest solution, but it's functional. Maps onto Windows well. Users will never directly see or use these files, so $lib-prefix/cabal-install. (GHC does this with its package.conf.)
I think that'll be broken for Debian which doesn't want random files in /usr/lib changing that much. peace, isaac