On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 10:48 PM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang@mit.edu> wrote:

Excerpts from Ramana Kumar's message of Wed Jan 30 14:46:26 -0800 2013:

> > 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 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