ignore all the stuff about haskell platform. use this http://ghcformacosx.github.io/ and the Library / ~/Library stuff is wholely an artifact of haskell platform. use the vanilla cabal config setup that uses ~/.cabal and entails putting ~/.cabal/bin in your PATH use cabal sandbox for application dev that you plan to deploy elsewhere / share (because you'll easily wind up having multiple projects going on at once) and use normal cabal install (into ~/.cabal) otherwise. On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 7:42 AM, Nicola Gigante wrote:

Hi

I know this question might be a little old, but I happen to have a from scratch installation of OS X (yosemite) on my machine and I want to install the haskell tools in the currently best way.

So I summarize the options that I understand are available:

1) A non-option first: the Homebrew formula for haskell-platform is no longer available, but… 2) There are formulas for GHC (7.8.x) and cabal, so I can install those and install the other packages with the homebrew cabal. 3) I can install the binary distribution of the Haskell Platform for OS X directly from the website, and then install any needed package with cabal. 4) I’ve heard of Nix, what is this all about? 5) Installing manually the binary distributions of ghc and cabal. No thanks.

That said, what is the recommended way to manage packages once I have cabal and ghc?

1) Installing everything locally into ~/Library/Haskell, which afaik is the default behavior of cabal. That also means having ~/Library/Haskell/bin in the PATH. But do I have to also have ~/.cabal/bin in the PATH? Why having two different local bin directories? What happens to the packages installed by haskell platform system-wide? They are left there, shadowed by the local ones, and never again touched nor updated?

2) Installing everything globally, changing the cabal configuration to make it the default. Afaik bad idea, but then I don’t have obsoleted packages installed system-wide.

3) Installing nothing, and relying on sandboxes to install exactly what is needed for any single package I need. This option is still a bit mysterious to me. 3a) If I need to install a package I need for development, I do cabal sandbox init in my source tree and then if I install something from inside it, cabal installs it in the sandbox. Am I correct? 3a) If I need to install a package I need to _use_, instead, what to do?

Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the clarification.

Bye, Nicola _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe