Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can cabal be turned into a package manager?

Well, one advantage of cabal over nix is that cabal works on windows. I haven't tried to install nix on windows, but: "Portability. Nix should run on most Unix systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X." Has anyone tried it? Cheers, Ivan On 12 December 2012 18:55, Ertugrul Söylemez wrote:

"Janek S." wrote:

...

In the recent months there was a lot of dicussion about cabal, dependency hell and alike. After reading some of these discussions there is a question I just have to ask:

Why not create a package manager (like rpm or apt) for Haskell software?

There is no need to reinvent that. See below.

...

I've been using Linux for years. Software for Linux is mostly written in C and C++. There are thousands of libraries with lots of dependencies and yet: a) Linux distributions manage to have package repositories that are kept in a consistent state b) Linux package managers can avoid dependency hell, automatically update to new packages, etc. Linux people did it! Is there any technical issue that prevents Haskell people from doing exactly the same thing? Or are we just having non-technical problems like lack of money or developers?

Actually Linux distributions do all the hard work for you. Package maintainers know what I'm talking about. It's a difficult task to specify correct dependencies, tedious to negotiate with all the other developers and all in all provide a consistent system. But that's only half of the story.

The problem starts with the File Hierarchy Standard (FHS), which essentially doesn't allow you to employ a more useful concept. That's why an experimental (yet quite usable) Linux distribution called NixOS [1] has established. It recognizes the problems of the FHS. The solution is simple and radical: the FHS sucks, so ignore it.

NixOS uses the Nix package manager, which you can also use for your Haskell packages to escape from the dependency hell. With Nix you can even allow all users to install arbitrary packages without interfering with other users, even the same packages with different versions. Two programs can depend on different versions of the same library, etc. It's the package manager of the future. Unfortunately the concept is new and different enough that it will be difficult to convince a large portion of the Linux community to employ it. It's the same issue Haskell has in the programming language world.

There is no need to switch to NixOS to use Nix. You can even install it in your home directory.

[1]: http://nixos.org/

Greets, Ertugrul

-- Not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and ... that is the list monad.

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