On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts@worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
On Wed, 2008-09-03 at 17:54 -0400, David Menendez wrote:
In my experience thus far, MacPorts feels like a poor match for Cabal. As far as I can tell, you get at most one active installation of a given port, which means you can't use MacPorts to manage packages for multiple Haskell environments (GHC and Hugs, stable GHC and development GHC, etc.), and after a GHC upgrade, any installed Haskell packages will still be installed, even though the new GHC can't see or use them.
That's exactly the same situation as with Gentoo. We provide a ghc-updater program that re-installs all the existing libs for the new ghc. Gentoo also only provides libs for ghc.
That's more convenient than re-installing all the libs by hand. I guess that's good enough for non-developer use; someone who just wants to install a program doesn't need to have more than one version of GHC installed, for example. It pains me to see the assumption that Haskell = GHC built in to our distribution methods, though. RPM apparently handles this by having the library packages install themselves under new names that include the environment name and version. I assume Nix can handle multiple Haskell environments. Does anyone know whether arch linux and debian can handle multiple Haskell environments? -- Dave Menendez <dave@zednenem.com> <http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/>