2 ms·

The problem Cabal is trying to solve here is supposedly more difficult than that solved by Gem, Pip, and other package managers. GHC does some kind of cross-lib

by Doji 12y ago

The problem Cabal is trying to solve here is supposedly more difficult than that solved by Gem, Pip, and other package managers. GHC does some kind of cross-library optimization that causes dependency problems in routine situations. I agree we shouldn't have one package manager per language, but I think so far no one package manager has proved sufficiently general and robust to serve all use cases. For example, I think something like Nix would be wonderful for all language communities, but it doesn't run on windows. That immediately takes it out of the running. And as far as I'm aware, all other package mangers would have the same "Hell" problems of cabal because of the GHC optimization mentioned above.

freyrs3 12y ago
It is more difficult. By design Haskell shifts an enormous number of failure modes to compile-time and as such cabal gets an unnecessary amount of blame for library bugs. If you ``pip install`` a package that transitively dependencies on another library where the author has accidently introduced a backwards incompatibility in the API that occurs in 5% of use-cases, pip won't detect the change and will happily install the package and 95% of people will assume no problem exists until they hit a runtime failure. The job that pip has to do is trivial actually. In Haskell if there is an incompatibility that breaks the interface, and in the presence of "wild west" packages there will be, then it will manifest as a compile time build error instead of proceeding.
sjy 12y ago
Not only is the package management problem more difficult, it's not the problem that Cabal (the Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries) was intended to solve! cabal-install is not a package manager; it can't uninstall packages or even record which packages it has installed.

2 ms·

The problem Cabal is trying to solve here is supposedly more difficult than that solved by Gem, Pip, and other package managers. GHC does some kind of cross-lib

by Doji 12y ago

freyrs3 12y ago
It is more difficult. By design Haskell shifts an enormous number of failure modes to compile-time and as such cabal gets an unnecessary amount of blame for library bugs. If you ``pip install`` a package that transitively dependencies on another library where the author has accidently introduced a backwards incompatibility in the API that occurs in 5% of use-cases, pip won't detect the change and will happily install the package and 95% of people will assume no problem exists until they hit a runtime failure. The job that pip has to do is trivial actually. In Haskell if there is an incompatibility that breaks the interface, and in the presence of "wild west" packages there will be, then it will manifest as a compile time build error instead of proceeding.
sjy 12y ago
Not only is the package management problem more difficult, it's not the problem that Cabal (the Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries) was intended to solve! cabal-install is not a package manager; it can't uninstall packages or even record which packages it has installed.