[Freebsd-haskell] What's the point of the cabal freebsd ports?

[Tim Matthews]

Some of the cabal ports have there own freebsd ports but not many and the
ones that are there are usually old anyway. Luckily the cabal packages on
hackage work just fine and I was installing manually each one like:

runhaskell Setup.lhs configure --user
runhaskell Setup.lhs build
runhaskell Setup.lhs install

because I was assuming that there was some reason why cabal-install could
not be used on freebsd. Eventually I realized that this was not true and
installing the packages that have lots of dependencies actually became more
worthwhile as it was very tedious before. I was then using cabal with the
exception of choosing the port versions if they existed as if there would be
some advantage in doing so. It wasn't long before I ran into a port that
didn't build (maybe because it was old) so I tried letting cabal just pull
the later one from hackage. This built just fine. I shall probably remove
the other freebsd haskell ports from my system and replace with updated
hackage ones.

What's the point of all this? I think if freebsd only had ports for the
basic stuff like haskell platform and other compilers then it could
potentially make it easier for the devs/testers to finally get the updated
ghc 6.12.1 version in the main tree.

Sorry if this sounds harsh but it seems like the current setup is stale,
messy and inconsistent which could be trimmed down, maintained + cabal is a
package that really does need to be in the ports but currently isn't so.

Thanks
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