mle+cl:
Don Stewart wrote:
Well, the number one thing is to use Cabal and the cabal-install tool. That is the simplest way to avoid headaches.
I'm sure cabal works very well for many people, but for anyone who has used Debian based distributions for some time, cabal really does seem like a backward step.
For instance, I regularly develop on 6 machines; personal laptop, home desktop, 2 work desktops and 2 work build machines.
At work, the main output of my development work is Debian packages (which get installed on hundreds of machines), and the Debian packages I create have build depends on whatever compilers and libraries are required to build them. We also have a build bot that runs nightly in a clean chroot for each package so that build depends can be verified to be correct.
However, if I install compilers or libraries using cabal there is no package to build depend on, breaking a system which currently works very, very well for all the code we build in C, C++ and Ocaml.
I encourage *strongly* the Debian community to package up hackage packages natively, as we have done on Gentoo and Arch. (This can be automated, in fact, see cabal2arch). cabal-install will work on any system. If you have particular distro requirements, consider distro-specific package tools. -- Don