Duncan Coutts wrote:
As far as I can see there's no conflict between the advocates of mini and maxi installers (as aimed at new users) except for this behaviour of new sandboxes.
All we need to do is make "cabal sandbox init" start with a minimal package set, rather than taking the global package db.
It's true that the ghc/platform installers could help with this, e.g. by shipping an environment file (a new 7.10 feature) that lists all the core packages, and cabal-install could use this as a basis for new sandboxes.
It would be nice if trying to install a package in the sandbox that is already present in the platform would result in a binary copy rather than a new compilation. But this is just a small optimization. Personally, I like to use a sandbox for every project to get a stable set of dependencies -- I often don't use a .cabal file for on/off projects. Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com