6 ms·

Haskell is a bit rare and so are its libraries rarely installed on systems. I can't remember, as arch has a proper package and I built hledger only once on a di

• enriquto 7y ago
  Whatever. Either they are dependencies that are required to be installed beforehand (just like a haskel compiler is required), or they are included in the source code distribution. Downloading them at compile time is very strange, and in my eyes unacceptable.
  • x3ro 7y ago
    While I do see that this might be valuable, I find the argument strange and it makes me wonder in which area you work that this is so alien to you. I've generally come to expect that any software I download and try to build might, through a package manager, pull in additional dependencies (rust, Haskell, scala/Java/closure,...). The only real outliers here seem to be C and C++, of the ones I've worked with.
  • owaty 7y ago
    It's not different from what pip install or gem install do by default. A mature Haskell project such as hledger has probably a few hundred of transitive dependencies, so you won't be able to install them individually by hand. You might try to figure whether each of them is packaged by your distribution (unlikely, unless hledger itself is packaged), but that's not a typical path — just don't use make in that case.
    • enriquto 7y ago
      > It's not different from what pip install or gem install do by default. Pip installing required packages is alright. But I expect setup.py to NOT call pip install by itself. > A mature Haskell project such as hledger has probably a few hundred of transitive dependencies That's horrifying!
      • smichael 7y ago
        Maybe so. :) It's also code reuse, actually working, and quite common for non-trivial end-user apps, particularly in the Haskell world. I'm not sure what kind of software you're used to. It's interesting to imagine how hledger would be different if I wrote everything myself, but I have to think it would be far less further along.
        • enriquto 7y ago
          Thanks for your answer! I'm used to mostly C, C++ and Python projects. In the worst cases, when I download and compile a program I have to install two or three dependencies, and it is OK if I do it by hand. For an eminently unix-friendly program like hledger I was expecting a similar ease of installation (i.e., I have an arbitrary haskell compiler and I can just compile the program running "make"). But I was surprised that this is not the case; obviously the traditions of the haskell community are different. Yet, it seems very difficult to install this program in a controlled environment without internet access.
          • smichael 7y ago
            Thanks. Well if we assume "arbitrary haskell compiler" means GHC and stack (or just stack), "make install" will compile it. But yes, there will be much downloading, unless you just happen to have all those haskell libs cached locally from previous builds. "stack install hledger" would compile just the command line tool (not the curses & web tools), so less downloading. For end-users who want minimum downloading/building, we recommend one of the binary packages on the download page (nix, docker, homebrew, windows/wine), but that's not you I think.
  • allannienhuis 7y ago
    Almost every widely used modern language has a package manager ecosystem that does exactly this. How is that very strange? There are well debated pros and cons with the use of package managers of course, but to call it strange is, well, strange. :)
    • enriquto 7y ago
      I'm used to Python's "pip install", but I have never seen it called from inside the "setup.py" of a particular program.