Hi Ryan, Ryan Grant [mailto:rgrant@rgrant.org] said:
Are packages cabal-installed using --global?
The packages that come with a compiler or Haskell Platform are installed --global. Every other package is installed with cabal, by default into the user's space.
Is it mostly reliant on cabal or cabal-dev?
It works with cabal. I have not tested interworking with cabal-dev yet. (There is a big overlap in the functionality of course.)
How easily can I upgrade cabal? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5380888/cabal-install-and-debian
The stackoverflow discussion seems a little confused in that 'cabal update' just updates the local cache of package headers from the server, not any of the installed packages. But I am using the latest version of cabal-install (0.10.2), compiled with cabal-1.10.1.0 library (from March rather than June's cabal-1.10.2.0). Users should never have to build their own cabal-install, but just keep up to date with the distro. If users should need to use their own private Cabal builds for whatever reason we will provide a wiki page showing them how to do it.
Can the idea be extended to OSX, as well?
I see no reason why not. The idea behind my post was really to say that we should be doing this with all distros. I will be making the hub sources available through hackage/github when beta testing is complete (but sooner if demand dictates). Folks can install it on their own systems and hook in their own GHC and HP builds. Best of all folks can make it available in other Haskell distros. The interesting question is whether anyone else decides to structure their distros in the same way as the justhub distro. That is the real challenge!
How does this strategy relate to the Nix package manager? http://nixos.org/nix/
In a sense the philosophy is similar because I am arguing that we shouldn't be updating distributions, just adding to them. In that sense it is a functional philosophy. But after that 30,000 foot observation the comparison diverges as far as I can see. Great questions! Thanks, Chris