On Wed Dec 31 2014 at 4:25:12 PM Herbert Valerio Riedel <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello Michael, > > On 2014-12-31 at 15:10:37 +0100, Michael Snoyman wrote: > > tl;dr: Now that ghc (the library) doesn't depend on Cabal (the library), > > can we remove Cabal from the global package database installed with GHC? > > [...] > > > For both of these reasons, I think we should limit the number of packages > > included in the global package database. One seemingly small step we > could > > do on that front is not include extraneous packages. In GHC 7.10rc1, that > > includes Cabal and xhtml: > > btw, haskeline and terminfo should be considered as well, according to > your argument. > > Yes, I didn't mean to imply that my list was exhaustive, those were just two examples that jumped out at me. > > both packages are in the global package database, but could just as > > easily be removed from there and installed by users. The motivation > > for that would be to avoid problem (1) above. > > However, as for xhtml, haskeline and terminfo, we had to register/expose > them in the global pkg DB due to > > https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8919 > > IIUC, this comes down to the fact that distros want to install all packages into the global database, whereas the pain point I'm describing here is from users wanting to *avoid* having things in the global database. Perhaps there's a simple solution here: if end-users non-distro installations of GHC unregistered those packages, would it cause them any problems? Perhaps having those packages in the global database is something that *only* distros need. > and as for Cabal, I have been told (maybe Duncan can weigh in...?) that > Haskell implementations need to provide it (together with a `*hc-pkg` > executable) in order to conform to the CABAL specification[1]. > > > If that's the case, I would request that we modify the CABAL specification. I wouldn't want us to make a bad technical decision because a spec told us to do so. Michael
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