Am Montag, 27. November 2006 15:47 schrieb Ian Lynagh:
[...] So, I would like to through down the gauntlet to the community to make this happen! We have ambitions to make large steps in this direction at Hac 07 http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_2007 (but that shouldn't stop people who can't be there from working on it too, or people working on it before then!).
I have to admit that I didn't follow the development of Cabal-related tools very closely, so perhaps my concerns are already handled: Given a normal Linux distribution, the *only* sensible way to install/remove/... any SW is not via some specialized tools like cabal-foo or hackage-bar, but via tools like rpm, apt-get, smart, ... and their related GUI frontends. Doing things behind the back of the native package manager will lead to trouble sooner or later, and many users will outright reject any other tool (for very good reasons). Another thing is that I fear duplication of features like e.g. package signing, handling installation sources, searching for new packages, notification of updates, etc. To give an example for my openSUSE 10.1: If one finds some interesting package repository on e.g. http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories its URL can easily be added to YaST (the openSUSE package management GUI), perhaps importing some keys to trust in the future, and starting from that point, the packages from that repository are seamlessly integrated with the rest: One can search for new interesting packages, install/remove packages, get update notifications, etc. The right way for openSUSE (and probably every RPM-based distro) would be to set up some kind of Haskell repository, and there are even efforts into that direction. I am sure that this has already been considered somehow, but could somebody be so kind to give a short explanation of the plans in this area? I think that the proposed tools should somehow be called from RPM .spec files, but I am missing the big picture... Cheers, S.