Simon Marlow
Claus Reinke wrote:
- i don't want to have to remove anything explicitly, because that would mean bypassing the haskell installation managers - i would want to see a single haskell installation manager for each system,
I think that's fundamentally the wrong approach. We shouldn't have to build a "Haskell installation manager". Would you also want installation managers for Perl, Python, Ruby, C, C++, etc. each with their own different user interfaces and feature sets? I think not - you want a single package manager for the whole system from which you can install/uninstall libraries for any language.
This is something that Windows gets completely wrong. Why do I have twelve icons in my status bar all representing little programs that are running in the background checking for updates to their own bits of software? Why on earth do I have a Printer Driver Update Manager? And I'd be wondering the same thing about a "Haskell installation manager": installation and dependencies are not something specific to Haskell.
Well, then there are developers who don't want to do .ebuilds, .rpms for 20 distributions, .debs for 20 distributions, .cabs... Meaning that if you have a project with 5 developers using 3 1/2 distributions, you will have a hard time installing. Haskell code tends to be platform unspecific, one shouldn't have to write platform-specific installation code just to make users happy. You have a point, though, and I wouldn't mind at all cabal-install being integrated into portage, that is, make portage _understand_ .cabal files and introduce another field in them that specifies non-haskell (e.g. gtk) dependencies. That is: I'd like to see a cabal-install for every system, using native package management where possible. Aren't there any usable third-party package managers for windoze? Maybe we can hook properly into cygwin, though it's surely not meant to support non-binary packages. Maybe gentoo should start to do binary releases, too, superseding debian and any other distribution. On another approach vector, I wouldn't want to update my Eve client using portage. It has to check whether there's a patch available before it connects to the server, anyway, so it can as well update. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for past copyright information. All rights reserved. Unauthorised copying, hiring, renting, public performance and/or broadcasting of this signature prohibited.