2008/5/30 Achim Schneider
I already was pleasantly surprised when discovering cabal-install, I think it deserves some more prominence, or even integration into cabal itself, to make everyone aware of the fact that there's such a thing as automatic installation and tempt people to make it work.
I completely agree, cabal-install is very nice, and should be more widely known.
CPAN, of course, makes its life a lot easier by not caring about outside dependencies at all: You can install GTK bindings without having GTK installed... which of course does not work with Haskell, as things must be linked properly.
Not true : GTK bindings have a C part which needs to be properly linked as well, you can't install them without GTK on your computer. On the other hand, CPAN and the make-like tools in Perl are much more mature and have more functionality than Cabal now (and they're a bit of a mess too...) and there is often a external dependancies downloader and installer integrated in packages. Another truly important difference between CPAN and cabal-install is the importance of the testing suite, all CPAN tools are geared so that by default nothing is installed if it doesn't pass its test and there's always a good number of tests. (So even when external dependancies don't prevent the module from being build, it won't install without forcing it) -- Jedaï