On 31 May 2010 20:14, Pete Chown <1...@234.cx> wrote: > I was just thinking, interactions between Cabal and the distribution package > manager could get worse, as shared Haskell libraries become more common. > Suppose a distribution ships a package 'foo', but not a package 'bar' which > depends on it. The 'foo' package includes shared libraries. The user now > installs 'bar' using Cabal. This causes Cabal to install 'foo' (because it > is a dependency) and it won't use the distribution's package manager.
Why won't it? This, of course, depends on how the distribution ships `foo' in regards to static/shared libraries and what the user's options to Cabal/cabal-install are. In Gentoo, for example, we at the moment only build static libraries, mainly because there has been no pressing need/request for shared libraries; however it would definitely be possible to add support for them (might be difficult dependency-wise if shared library support it optional, but this is also a problem we haven't resolved yet for profiling libraries). > If 'foo' is built as a shared library, programs built by the user will not > work for anyone else. Other users will have the distribution's build of > 'foo' rather than Cabal's build. If 'foo' is built statically, it's not > quite so bad, but the user will not get the benefits that could come from > using shared libraries. In general, even if some application is built statically then it won't work on other machines due to different C library versions (GMP, etc.), so I don't think this is such a big deal. Of course, the big thing here is whether Linux distributions, etc. should ship static or shared libraries by default. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
