On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 4:02 AM, Oren Ben-Kiki <haskell-oren@ben-kiki.org> wrote

For example, The problem of handling the distro's package manager (whatever it is) with a language's package is a separate and thorny issue, which I think can't be "perfectly" solved short of unrealistic rewrite-the-world solutions. E.g., what happens if you do apt-get install cabal" and then use cabal to update itself to the newest version? What happens if you then "apt-get upgrade" and there's a newer version than the one apt installed, but it is older than the one you installed manually? etc.

I do this all the time and haven't ran into a problem yet. Is there something in particular you expect to break?

I install GHC from my distro database and use that to bootstrap my way into whatever Haskell dev environment I feel is suitable.

At the moment that looks like "sudo apt-get install cabal-install" (or whatever the appropriate syntax is) followed by "cabal update && cabal install cabal-install".

I guess this would break if Debian slipped in a new version of GHC behind my back, but they're pretty cautious about that sort of thing, and the fix would be re-building my user-install of cabal-install.