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

"Richard O'Keefe" wrote:

On 21 Apr 2009, at 11:36 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:

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"Richard O'Keefe" wrote:

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Some of the right questions are - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have administrator access to?

Irrelevant.

How van the question that is the very heart of this thread be "irrelevant"?

This is precisely the situation I'm in, and it's precisely the class of users I'm arguing for.

I'm encouraged by the constructive suggestions of package tools (nix, portage) that are said to address some of these issues. Except of course that I have to install them first...

It's irrelevant, because I _do_ have root access to my machine, but don't want to get forced into using it by a question that implies that if you have access, you're going to use it. I didn't mean to nit pick, though, I thought you were arguing for the other side... I think the right question is "how many people prefer user installs over system installs, wrt. their hackage packages?". I estimate that, concerning developers, who are used to install still-buggy, self-written libraries, as well as install things while working, the percentage is very, very high: At least I don't want my workflow to be broken to deal with the formal requirements of a global install while developing, and I guess many others feel the same way.[1] Endusers, of course, might have other preferences, but cabal doesn't (IMHO) cater to them, directly: It caters to distribution packages (or windows installers, or whatever), so cabal's default behaviour is quite irrelevant for those cases. [1] Thinking of it... is there a way to tell cabal to pretend a package is installed by giving the path to it's source directory? Just like include directories, but with packages. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.