On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 10:48 PM, Edward Z. Yang
This argument seems specious. Whether or not cabal-install is or not intended to be a package manager, users expect it to act like one (as users expect rubygems to be a package manager), and, at the end of the day, that is what matters.
But playing along with their delusion might make it harder to change
Excerpts from Ramana Kumar's message of Wed Jan 30 14:46:26 -0800 2013: their
minds.
Looking at the library ecosystems of the most popular programming languages, I think this ship has already sailed.
I was talking only about Haskell and cabal. There is a viable alternative to using cabal as a package manager on Arch Linux (the Arch-Haskell package repositories). There is also the Stackage project that might make this possible on more distributions with real package managers. But if you keep calling cabal a package manager, eventually you'll have to write the patches to make it one.
Edward