On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 14:51 +0000, Dave Bayer wrote:
The Hackage/Cabal universe takes the perspective that one is a committed Haskell user, and one wants the same diversity of tools enjoyed, say, in the Perl universe. When one uses Haskell to write a tool whose use is standalone and not Haskell-specific, there's a very good chance that someone will come along and try to build it for a new platform, installing and using GHC for the first time in order to do so. The barrier to entry is easily doubled if one has to also figure out how to obtain libraries that do not come automatically with GHC. Plenty of us have the moxie to install a package like GHC for a single use, because we've heard that "hackers" can do such things easily, but we don't really want to join each treehouse.
The plan/goal is for ghc and hopefully other implementations to come with cabal-install so that when you try and build your random cabal package it'll be able to download, build and install all the deps (without necessarily requiring root). So in the end you should not have to figure out all the deps yourself, it's just that at the moment we're kind of in an intermediate phase. Duncan