On 09/09/2015 12:22 AM, Gershom B wrote:

That _does_ look simpler!

However, I think there are multiple efforts underway towards the nix-style stuff. We had a GSoC on that for example. And in that workflow, if it all works out properly, then we end up with a situation where since the general-user-db has no conflicts, then sandboxes are the tools that become generally not required.

So I would be quite hesitant about moving things in the other direction...

I do see some advantages to having sandboxes still, namely isolation of the binaries into a single directory that you can put into $PATH, but I'm assuming/hoping there's some way to handle that in nix-style cabal/cabal-install as well. (If that turns out to be wrong, I imagine a middle-of-the-road approach here would be to just have a single package database and treat it as a simple cache of all the binaries ever compiled and we could still keep sandboxing for binaries and such..That might also nicely solve the problem of redudant compilation which happens with sandboxes now.) Just out of curiousity, when is the GSoC deadline? FWIW, I'd also be happy if sandboxes could be scrapped (as being unnecessary) rather than the other way round. The main point of this execercise was to show how much simpler things *could* be, if we really want them to. (I think cabal-install *needs* to become a lot simpler if it's to be in any way maintainable and extendable.) Regards,

On 09/09/2015 10:08 AM, Kosyrev Serge wrote:

Bardur Arantsson writes:

...

On 09/09/2015 12:22 AM, Gershom B wrote:

...

That _does_ look simpler!

However, I think there are multiple efforts underway towards the nix-style stuff. We had a GSoC on that for example. And in that workflow, if it all works out properly, then we end up with a situation where since the general-user-db has no conflicts, then sandboxes are the tools that become generally not required.

So I would be quite hesitant about moving things in the other direction...

I do see some advantages to having sandboxes still, namely isolation of the binaries into a single directory that you can put into $PATH, but I'm assuming/hoping there's some way to handle that in nix-style cabal/cabal-install as well. (If that turns out to be wrong, I imagine a middle-of-the-road approach here would be to just have a single package database and treat it as a simple cache of all the binaries ever compiled and we could still keep sandboxing for binaries and such..That might also nicely solve the problem of redudant compilation which happens with sandboxes now.)

Just out of curiousity, when is the GSoC deadline?

Success was recently announced:

https://www.mail-archive.com/cabal-devel%40haskell.org/msg10091.html

Thanks for the pointer. Not sure how I missed that. Looks very promising -- I'll give it a whirl some time in the next few days. Regards,