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It's still bad and cabal is still bad. I was in #haskell on IRC not too long ago and they couldn't even figure out why a haskell-platform install couldn't upgra

It's still bad and cabal is still bad. I was in #haskell on IRC not too long ago and they couldn't even figure out why a haskell-platform install couldn't upgrade its own cabal with no other packages installed. Your propagandizing is either based on very insulated anecdote or you're being disingenuous for the sake of promoting your favorite language. The salesmanship does not help Haskell and sets expectations poorly. Fix ghc-pkg and cabal! Clojure and Go make this look ridiculous and unnecessary. N.B. Been using Haskell off and on for 3 years. Never once has it not been a pain.

Peaker 14y ago
I am not saying cabal is perfect, but the situation has dramatically improved since the prevention of spurious reinstalls. It also seems that hackage uploaders are playing nicer these days, and I just generally get far less breakage. Lots of work is being done on Haskell's package system to make it better. I've been using Haskell for 5 years. It used to be very painful. It is only rarely painful these days.
- codewright 14y ago
  It's rarely painful these days because you've spent 5 years learning it.
  - Peaker 14y ago
    Experience comes into it too, but as I mentioned earlier, they mostly fixed the "butteryfly problem" by avoiding spurious reinstalls. The butterfly problem was the source of at least 90% of the pain relating to cabal installations. They are also going to allow multiple installations of the same package version with differing dependencies very soon, which will help alleviate some of the final problems still there with cabal. I do think that it is not my relatively smooth experience that is the anomaly, but your unsmooth recent experience. Perhaps your installation was somehow borked? Perhaps you were trying to install new packages using a very old "cabal-install" that still had long-fixed issues? If you just install the newest Haskell Platform and run "cabal install cabal-install" that does work on Linux. For Windows, IIRC, you also need to install cygwin/mingw (well-documented) and then it is a smooth install as well. I don't know about OS X but it is generally smoother than Windows. Can you describe in more detail the actual problem you encountered?
papsosouid 14y ago
>It's still bad and cabal is still bad. No, it isn't. You have the exact same problems with CPAN and everyone and even the most devoted perl-haters will admit "perl is a terrible language, but CPAN is amazing". You run into the exact same problems with every other language, the only difference being dynamic languages tend to be lazy about correctly managing version numbers, so you get "installs properly but completely breaks my app" instead of "tells you it can't install because of a version conflict". >I was in #haskell on IRC not too long ago and they couldn't even figure out why a haskell-platform install couldn't upgrade its own cabal with no other packages installed. Well obviously, since it does in fact work just fine, it is quite difficult to figure out what weirdness that individual did to create his problem.
- codewright 14y ago
  >You have the exact same problems with CPAN I don't use Perl and that's a crock anyway. I've used Leiningen on Clojure, easy_install/pip on Python and the Golang stack happily with no trouble. I don't like XML or Java, but you'd have a hard time arguing Maven "doesn't work". It's what Leiningen is built upon anyway. Rubygems, rbenv, and bundler aren't perfect but they do largely work for everybody in the Ruby community. Quicklisp has done a lot to improve the state of affairs in Common Lisp and made it pretty easy to use arbitrary libraries. It's ghc-pkg/cabal on Haskell that have been a pain in the ass. Even sbt on Scala is better and that sucks too. Cut the tu quoque bullshit, not everybody has a crappy ecosystem. Those that don't, don't because they didn't project a reality distortion field so they could pretend everything was hunky-dory. Python used to have serious packaging problems. It got over them and eventually became a smooth experience because people recognized the problem and worked on it. Clojure without Leiningen was horrific. Hagelberg's work there was amazing. The Golang team has taken things like this seriously all along and since 1.0 a lot of things have been standardized. Stop denying there's a problem. I'm far from the first person to mention the Haskell ecosystem need works. The REAL irritation isn't with just ghc-pkg and cabal, but rather that I keep running into crazed partisans like you that won't admit there's a problem. You're the problem.
  - papsosouid 14y ago

Peaker 14y ago

I am not saying cabal is perfect, but the situation has dramatically improved since the prevention of spurious reinstalls. It also seems that hackage uploaders are playing nicer these days, and I just generally get far less breakage. Lots of work is being done on Haskell's package system to make it better. I've been using Haskell for 5 years. It used to be very painful. It is only rarely painful these days.

codewright 14y ago
It's rarely painful these days because you've spent 5 years learning it.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Experience comes into it too, but as I mentioned earlier, they mostly fixed the "butteryfly problem" by avoiding spurious reinstalls. The butterfly problem was the source of at least 90% of the pain relating to cabal installations. They are also going to allow multiple installations of the same package version with differing dependencies very soon, which will help alleviate some of the final problems still there with cabal. I do think that it is not my relatively smooth experience that is the anomaly, but your unsmooth recent experience. Perhaps your installation was somehow borked? Perhaps you were trying to install new packages using a very old "cabal-install" that still had long-fixed issues? If you just install the newest Haskell Platform and run "cabal install cabal-install" that does work on Linux. For Windows, IIRC, you also need to install cygwin/mingw (well-documented) and then it is a smooth install as well. I don't know about OS X but it is generally smoother than Windows. Can you describe in more detail the actual problem you encountered?

papsosouid 14y ago

>It's still bad and cabal is still bad. No, it isn't. You have the exact same problems with CPAN and everyone and even the most devoted perl-haters will admit "perl is a terrible language, but CPAN is amazing". You run into the exact same problems with every other language, the only difference being dynamic languages tend to be lazy about correctly managing version numbers, so you get "installs properly but completely breaks my app" instead of "tells you it can't install because of a version conflict". >I was in #haskell on IRC not too long ago and they couldn't even figure out why a haskell-platform install couldn't upgrade its own cabal with no other packages installed. Well obviously, since it does in fact work just fine, it is quite difficult to figure out what weirdness that individual did to create his problem.

codewright 14y ago
>You have the exact same problems with CPAN I don't use Perl and that's a crock anyway. I've used Leiningen on Clojure, easy_install/pip on Python and the Golang stack happily with no trouble. I don't like XML or Java, but you'd have a hard time arguing Maven "doesn't work". It's what Leiningen is built upon anyway. Rubygems, rbenv, and bundler aren't perfect but they do largely work for everybody in the Ruby community. Quicklisp has done a lot to improve the state of affairs in Common Lisp and made it pretty easy to use arbitrary libraries. It's ghc-pkg/cabal on Haskell that have been a pain in the ass. Even sbt on Scala is better and that sucks too. Cut the tu quoque bullshit, not everybody has a crappy ecosystem. Those that don't, don't because they didn't project a reality distortion field so they could pretend everything was hunky-dory. Python used to have serious packaging problems. It got over them and eventually became a smooth experience because people recognized the problem and worked on it. Clojure without Leiningen was horrific. Hagelberg's work there was amazing. The Golang team has taken things like this seriously all along and since 1.0 a lot of things have been standardized. Stop denying there's a problem. I'm far from the first person to mention the Haskell ecosystem need works. The REAL irritation isn't with just ghc-pkg and cabal, but rather that I keep running into crazed partisans like you that won't admit there's a problem. You're the problem.
- papsosouid 14y ago