On 09 March 2005 19:55, Frederik Eaton wrote:

I agree that the case you're presenting is indeed more difficult, but I don't think you're doing the estimations right for the one at hand. The cost and annoyance of perhaps tens of thousands of people adding and remembering to maintain wrappers named 'ghc' somewhere in their path to accomplish this simple task (after scrounging in the documentation to find that ghc for some reason fails to be like many other compilers, a nontrivial cost in itself since the lack of environment variables isn't specifically documented) - or simply not doing so, and typing in -package-conf hundreds of times as I have done, because they may not have write access to the main package.conf - I think outweighs the cost of one person, once, adding central support for environment variables, a bit of documentation in the man page, perhaps a ghcbug program if we want super-detailed bug reports...

By the way, GHC 6.4 keeps a local package.conf in your home directory, and you can install packages into it with ghc-pkg --user, or ./setup --user for Cabal packages. Cheers, Simon