Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release

Achim Schneider wrote:

Don Stewart wrote:

...

This means that 'cabal install' works out of the box on every system, without needing admin/root privs (esp. important for students).

...and people who were bitten by sanity and thus never, ever touch /usr manually, only through their distribution's package manager.

This is good advice (/usr/local is fine though). However, the point here is surely that the de-facto default for all other downloaded programs - standard makefile setups, automake, autoconf, perl package, python packages, graphic installers like firefox - is do to what cabal calls a 'global' install by default. This makes cabal's inversion of default a violation of least surprise, however easy it may be to justify that user installs are better.