Simon Marlow wrote:
If you're on a system with a good package manager (i.e. *BSD, Debian, Gentoo) then the plan is that this is all handled by the system package manager. We don't want to duplicate that work, and we want to coexist with the system's package tools as much as possible. Cabal will make it easy to generate package skeletons for these systems.
I find that even on package managed systems I use CPAN to install perl modules... I would have thought a nice central repository on haskell.org (with mirrors of course) where users can contibute their packages, that would be built into a Haskell package tool would be useful even for systems where there is package management. I find that debian/gentoo etc do not have all the packages available for say perl, and it is nice to have a consistant interface on any platform... I think the ability to do (something like) > cabal install <package-name> and have everything done automatically would be a real advantage for beginners, ie: - download mirror list from haskell.org - find closest mirror using DNS tld - download package - resolve dependancies (ie call "cabal install" for each required package not on the system) - configure package - compile package - install package (globally if root, locally if normal user) also the ability to do queries like: > cabal list-packages -- lists all packages available from central archive > cabal find someRandomFunction -- returns name of package which exports given function To do some of the cleverer queries would require a custom server (perhaps darcs can do some/all of this)... Keean.