Well, one advantage of cabal over nix is that cabal works on windows. I haven't tried to install nix on windows, but:
"Portability. Nix should run on most Unix systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X." Has anyone tried it? Cheers, Ivan On 12 December 2012 18:55, Ertugrul Söylemez <e...@ertes.de> wrote: > "Janek S." <fremenz...@poczta.onet.pl> wrote: > >> In the recent months there was a lot of dicussion about cabal, >> dependency hell and alike. After reading some of these discussions >> there is a question I just have to ask: >> >> Why not create a package manager (like rpm or apt) for Haskell >> software? > > There is no need to reinvent that. See below. > > >> I've been using Linux for years. Software for Linux is mostly written >> in C and C++. There are thousands of libraries with lots of >> dependencies and yet: a) Linux distributions manage to have package >> repositories that are kept in a consistent state b) Linux package >> managers can avoid dependency hell, automatically update to new >> packages, etc. Linux people did it! Is there any technical issue that >> prevents Haskell people from doing exactly the same thing? Or are we >> just having non-technical problems like lack of money or developers? > > Actually Linux distributions do all the hard work for you. Package > maintainers know what I'm talking about. It's a difficult task to > specify correct dependencies, tedious to negotiate with all the other > developers and all in all provide a consistent system. But that's only > half of the story. > > The problem starts with the File Hierarchy Standard (FHS), which > essentially doesn't allow you to employ a more useful concept. That's > why an experimental (yet quite usable) Linux distribution called NixOS > [1] has established. It recognizes the problems of the FHS. The > solution is simple and radical: the FHS sucks, so ignore it. > > NixOS uses the Nix package manager, which you can also use for your > Haskell packages to escape from the dependency hell. With Nix you can > even allow all users to install arbitrary packages without interfering > with other users, even the same packages with different versions. Two > programs can depend on different versions of the same library, etc. > It's the package manager of the future. Unfortunately the concept is > new and different enough that it will be difficult to convince a large > portion of the Linux community to employ it. It's the same issue > Haskell has in the programming language world. > > There is no need to switch to NixOS to use Nix. You can even install it > in your home directory. > > [1]: http://nixos.org/ > > > Greets, > Ertugrul > > -- > Not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and (not to be or to be and > (not to be or to be and ... that is the list monad. > > _______________________________________________ > 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