On 25 October 2011 09:34, Ben Millwood <haskell@benmachine.co.uk> wrote:
Here's the advice I use on when to use what to install cabal packages:
http://www.vex.net/~trebla/haskell/sicp.xhtml
I think it's a bit overcautious, but rather that than the alternative. It's worth a read even if you don't follow the advice in the end.
I think the choice of which advice to follows boil down to something rather simple: how good is the quality of Haskell packages in your distribution? My main experience at the time of writing my blog post was with Gentoo, which had rather good support, especially for the popular packages (might be a bit behind for not-so-common ones, but easily bumped if a user asked it). Quite a few problems then arose with users trying to mix-and-match system packages with user packages, when there was no need to do so. But in distributions that _don't_ have good Haskell support (e.g. I'm currently using Exherbo, and mix-and-match system and user packages because the system packages are rather limited; I've been meaning to try and add native Cabal support to the package manager to fix this for about a year now, but I'm not looking forward to hacking in C++ :p), then it may make more sense to use user-packages only... _if_ you understand the limitations this has. Package managers for distributions are typically better suited for resolving dependencies (especially if you give them specific information like "containers isn't meant to be user-upgradeable" and which version of containers comes with which version of GHC) and are able to uninstall packages, which cabal-install can't do yet. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com