-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08/22/2010 06:41 AM, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
Hackage has limited support for distro maintainers to state which packages are available on the distribution. Last I checked, it required distro maintainers to keep a text file somewhere up to date.
Note that not all distributions bother.
It looks as if it's automated for Arch, however. Either that or somebody is spending an absurd amount of time keeping it manually up to date.
Last I heard, dons had a thing he ran that converted Cabal packages into Arch Linux packages automatically. I wouldn't be surprised if he had something that automated the whole procedure from Hackage download to Arch Linux upload.
As for why using your distro package manager for Haskell packages is
preferable:
http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-...
Right. So Cabal isn't a package manager because it only manages Haskell packages? Not sure I agree with that definition. (It also has a laundry list of problems that can and should be fixed, but won't be.)
So, remember your gripes elsethread about libcurl on Windows? That's what using a real package manager gets you: the non-Haskell dependencies are also handled and (assuming the packager isn't an idiot) Just Work.
I actually spent quite a while trying to figure out what the purpose of Cabal *is*. It's not like it's hard to download a bunch of Haskell source code and utter "ghc --make Foo". So why do we even need Cabal in the first place? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that registering a library manually is so excruciatingly
The answer is that it checks dependencies for you. This is a mixed blessing, however (see "cabal upgrade").
Actually, we have tools that automatically convert Cabal packages to Debian packages or RPMs or whatever. I think there could be some milage in a tool that builds Windows installers. (The problem, of course, is that you have to be able to *build* the library on Windows first!) You would of course then have all kinds of fun and games with dependency tracking...
And the big problem with Windows is an utter lack of consistency in package arrangement. Linux has the FHS; *BSD and the OSX environments (Fink and MacPorts) have mtree specifications; where did the Windows library you just installed decide to stick its files? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkxxTNgACgkQIn7hlCsL25UK3wCeMX/OySIyO3JXiDlijLEL1lM/ uesAn2LnchpzHqnbREYbrv347llLFkN6 =Ecxk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----