[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release

Edward Middleton wrote:

Achim Schneider wrote:

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Edward Middleton wrote:

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ghc 6.8.3 is /usr/bin/ghc on my office Mac, but nothing in the world prevents there being some other program called ghc that would also like to be there. Only by painstaking verification of a whole bunch of applications together can one be confident of "safety". Well then I guess we agree, so the question becomes who should do the painstaking verification. I think distribution maintainers should do this, you think end users who can't compile source packages should do this.

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Not the maintainers, but the tool. Portage doesn't install stuff if it would overwrite other things, records changes to files in e.g. /etc to be merged later (interactively, with diffs), and records every file it ever installed by having the package install itself in /var/portage/<package>/<version>. You are _completely_busted_ if your install script doesn't support that: The script runs sandboxed.

Portage even registers every installed package into an empty ghc package database, and merges them later. It knows what it does.

I can switch between different versions of packages, or different implementations of the same functionality (say, java-sun vs. java-blackdown) with eselect.

In short: Don't write your own install scripts, you're bound to get it wrong, and/or be vastly inferior, compared to portage.

But who writes the ebuild[1] ? That said, on the various system I run I have over 100 custom ebuilds that I maintain. I can do this because most applications have standard sane build systems that install things in the regular places.

Yes, usually it's just a matter of writing "inherit distutils" and figuring out (still missing) dependencies. While I utterly loathe autoconf, it has its merit... being widely used. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.