On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 09:20 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote: > Duncan Coutts wrote: > > Fri May 4 03:46:52 PDT 2007 Duncan Coutts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > * Use user installs by default > > So it "Just Works"tm without needing extra options or sudo fiddling. > > If you care you can still do sudo fiddling and --global-install > > This is inconsistent with Cabal and ghc-pkg, which both use global installs > by > default. At the time we felt that global installs were the more common case. > I > know this isn't a clear-cut issue though, and there are good arguments on > both > sides. For example, one could argue that only the system's package manager > should install packages globally, so since we're bypassing the system package > manager we should default to user installs. > > However, I'm more concerned that we are consistent, and avoid surprising > behaviour where possible.
The surprising behaviour I was trying to avoid was that by default it'd fail with an unhelpful error message. Having it work seems to be a better default. When doing manual, configure, build, install steps people are familiar with the notion that the install step needs to be done as root. When we are installing a whole set of packages automagically we don't quite have the same connection to the individual build steps and we kind of expect things to "Just Work"tm without a great deal of intervention. The only way we can do this is if you always run cabal-install as root. We'd have to make it clearer to people through the command line UI that this is the thing to do. This is also a slightly thing to get right, since if the user runs cabal-install update as non-root then the package db gets downloaded to their $HOME/.cabal-install/packages but if you then do cabal-install install as root then /root/.cabal-install/packages or /var/cache/cabal-install/packages probably is not up to date. As it happens, I'm not sure that --global by default for ghc-pkg and --user by default for cabal-install isn't right. The difference is in who is likely to be using the command and what level of control they expect. I'm cc'ing cabal-devel. Hopefully we can get some more opinions on this. Duncan _______________________________________________ cabal-devel mailing list cabal-devel@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cabal-devel
