I've gotten fed up with Cabal+Hackage build errors and I want a more stable way to manage Haskell packages. I'm NOT trying to build a Haskell project of my own, but I just want a system-wide (or at least user-wide) installation of GHC "with batteries", along with some Haskell programs that other people have written. I need xmonad installed somewhere on my $PATH and I need lens available with :m+ when I fire up ghci. I do NOT want a bunch of sandboxes scattered throughout my file system, some of which have these things installed while others don't. I was hoping Stack+Stackage would fit that bill, but going through the instructions on https://haskell-lang.org/get-started, it seems that stack is meant really for setting up sandboxes for particular projects. When I tried using it as a system-wide (or rather, user-wide) package manager, it fails. For instance, as suggested on that page, I created /tmp/HelloWorld.hs and type $ stack HelloWorld.hs which seemed to successfully download the lts-8.4 build plan and ghc-nopie-8.0.2. So far so good. But then when I typed $ stack install xmonad-contrib it said Error: While constructing the build plan, the following exceptions were encountered: In the dependencies for xmonad-contrib-0.13: X11-xft must match >=0.2, but the stack configuration has no specified version (latest applicable is 0.3.1) Recommended action: try adding the following to your extra-deps in /home/jun/.stack/global-project/stack.yaml: - X11-xft-0.3.1 You may also want to try the 'stack solver' command Plan construction failed. I've tried going down the "stack solver" rabbit hole, to no avail; it just tells me I need to register a directory containing a .cabal file. IIUC, that's a directory containing some project I'm developing? But I have no such project! (At the moment.) Am I fundamentally misunderstanding how stack is supposed to be used? Is stack usable as a package manager in the way cabal sort of was, and in the way apt-get or emerge can be used? If not, what do people recommend I use for that purpose? Nix? Or, perhaps, do the errors above indicate misconfiguration? I don't want to install haskell-platform because it's too outdated. I need at least GHC >= 8. I'm on the latest stable release of Ubuntu if that makes a difference. -- Jun Inoue