On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 03:50 -0700, David Roundy wrote:
Maybe the problem is that noone seems to know what problem cabal is supposed to be solving. What problem is that? Some say it's a configuration/build system. Others say it's a packaging system. I think it's the latter.
I'd say that Cabal is a build system but one that provides enough information to enable package management. That's the reason for the slight blurring/confusion with packaging systems. There is a much clearer division with autoconf/automake because it is a build system that does not provide enough information to enable package management. Cabal interfaces with package management systems in a similar way to ./configure && make && make install as one can see from the scripts that the distros use to build packages from source. Tools like cabal-rpm, hackport and dh_haskell use the information provided by cabal packages to make distro packages semi-automatically (It does not eliminate the QA job). cabal-install is a package manager for those Cabal packages that are not already packaged by the distros. It seems likely that there will always be a significant number of such packages as there is with CPAN etc. Hackage is an archive and distribution point for Cabal packages. Duncan