> Now, you say it's preferable to use the native package manager where > possible. I've got one word for you: Windows. You know, the most popular OS > on the market? The one installed on 98% of all computers world-wide? Guess > what: no native package manager.
Isn't Windows Installer (MSI) a package manager? /J On 22 August 2010 12:41, Andrew Coppin <andrewcop...@btinternet.com> wrote: > Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote: >> >> Hackage has limited support for distro maintainers to state which >> packages are available on the distribution. Last I checked, it required >> distro maintainers to keep a text file somewhere up to date. >> >> Note that not all distributions bother. > > Yeah, I figured. I don't see any Debian or OpenSUSE anywhere, and I know > they do have at least a few pre-built binary packages out there. > > It looks as if it's automated for Arch, however. Either that or somebody is > spending an absurd amount of time keeping it manually up to date. > >> (in particular none of us >> involved with packaging Haskell packages for Gentoo can be bothered; >> we're slowly cutting back into only keeping packages that will actually >> be used rather than all and sundry) > > Well, I guess you either manually select which packages to convert, or you > have an automated system convert everything in sight. > > This whole observation came about because I noticed that some (but not all) > of my own packages have ended up on Arch, despite being of almost no use to > anybody. I was just curious as to how that happened. > >> As for why using your distro package manager for Haskell packages is >> preferable: >> >> http://ivanmiljenovic.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/repeat-after-me-cabal-is-not-a-package-manager/ >> > > Right. So Cabal isn't a package manager because it only manages Haskell > packages? Not sure I agree with that definition. (It also has a laundry list > of problems that can and should be fixed, but won't be.) > > I actually spent quite a while trying to figure out what the purpose of > Cabal *is*. It's not like it's hard to download a bunch of Haskell source > code and utter "ghc --make Foo". So why do we even need Cabal in the first > place? The answer, as far as I can tell, is that registering a library > manually is so excruciatingly hard that we actually need a tool to automate > the process. (Obviously when I first started using Haskell, I was mainly > interested in writing runnable programs, not libraries.) Cabal can also run > Haddock for you, which is quite hard. But it wasn't until cabal-install came > along that I even realised that Cabal could track and resolve dependencies. > (The fact that it doesn't track installed executables is news to me.) > > If nothing else, I think that "what Cabal is" should be documented much more > clearly. It took me a hell of a long time to figure this out. > > Now, you say it's preferable to use the native package manager where > possible. I've got one word for you: Windows. You know, the most popular OS > on the market? The one installed on 98% of all computers world-wide? Guess > what: no native package manager. > > Actually, we have tools that automatically convert Cabal packages to Debian > packages or RPMs or whatever. I think there could be some milage in a tool > that builds Windows installers. (The problem, of course, is that you have to > be able to *build* the library on Windows first!) You would of course then > have all kinds of fun and games with dependency tracking... > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe