[Haskell-cafe] Re: Ubuntu and ghc

Achim Schneider wrote:

Simon Marlow wrote:

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Claus Reinke wrote:

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- 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.

But the whole point is that the Haskell library developer doesn't have to make all these packages: they just make a Cabal package, and the distro maintainers have tools that turn a Cabal package into a .ebuild, .deb, .rpm etc. There was also a tool to make Windows installers from Cabal packages in the works, but I haven't heard anything on that front for a while. Cheers, Simon