On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 09:22:56PM +0100, Duncan Coutts wrote:
In the initial discussions on a common architecture for building applications and libraries one of the goals was to reduce or eliminate untracked dependencies. The aim being that you could reliably deploy a package from one machine to another.
We settled on a fairly traditional model, where one specifies the names and versions of packages of Haskell code.
Do you actually have any precedent for such a system? I've never heard of one, but then I've been sort of sheltered, due to living in the linux world where there is a distinction between packagers and upstream authors. I consider this a useful distinction. But that's probably because I'm lazy, or perhaps because I care about my users--and thus like to give them options and reduce the dependencies of my software. I know there is a long history of the autoconf-style approach being successful. Can you point to any success stories of the approach chosen for cabal? David