cabal -z repl --package QuickCheck --repl-options="whatever"
is more of a pain to type than
ghci "whatever"
and that creating a .cabal file and running "cabal build" is more of a pain than typing "ghc", or is there something fundamental that the "global package database" supports that cabal v2-style does not?
Maybe it's superficial, but this is the big thing for me, yes. I also tend to have long-running ghci sessions, and so I don't always know what packages I'll want before launching.
Some of this is also, for me, philosophical: I don't want anything between me and GHC. That is, I want to know exactly what flags are being passed to GHC and to be able to control those flags myself. A tool that installs libraries should do that, and then get out of the way.
I think this amounts to a call for action to fix `cabal install --lib` (assuming the v2- variant). Indeed when I tried this with cabal-head my cabal store became unusable, which hasn't happened to me for a very long time now. (Deleting ~/.cabal/store/ghc-8.2.2 fixed it.) Cheers Ben -- I would rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned. -- Richard Feynman