On 28 February 2010 01:55, Diego Souza
currently when one install a cabal package it compiles it and then install generated binaries. I wonder whether or not it would be useful to have pre-compiled binaries as many package managers usually do (e.g. apt). I often think that would save some time on the expense of a busier hackage server capable of generating packages for many different platforms. I'm particularly thinking on the following scenario: suppose that you have code that is ready for production. If cabal supported pre-compiled binaries, there is no need to install ghc or eventually any other compiler, just runtime environment and eventually cabal. I must say that I have no experience in doing this in Haskell (just personal/small projects), so I suppose one have to generate binaries and use other sort of package manager to deploy code to production (which sounds reasonable as well). Thus, if the assumption is correct, cabal is a development tool, not something one could to only deploy runtime-only packages.
So, you need a binary for each version of GHC available (IIRC, Duncan is still testing new releases of Cabal for versions of GHC as old as 6.4) with and without profiling, with different possible optimization flags and for different architectures and operating systems... To me, that sounds like too much work. /me really wishes people stopped thinking of Cabal as a package manager -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com