environment variables for ghc

[Simon Marlow]

On 09 March 2005 19:55, Frederik Eaton wrote:

> I agree that the case you're presenting is indeed more difficult, but
> I don't think you're doing the estimations right for the one at hand.
> The cost and annoyance of perhaps tens of thousands of people adding
> and remembering to maintain wrappers named 'ghc' somewhere in their
> path to accomplish this simple task (after scrounging in the
> documentation to find that ghc for some reason fails to be like many
> other compilers, a nontrivial cost in itself since the lack of
> environment variables isn't specifically documented) - or simply not
> doing so, and typing in -package-conf hundreds of times as I have
> done, because they may not have write access to the main package.conf
> - I think outweighs the cost of one person, once, adding central
> support for environment variables, a bit of documentation in the man
> page, perhaps a ghcbug program if we want super-detailed bug
> reports...

By the way, GHC 6.4 keeps a local package.conf in your home directory,
and you can install packages into it with ghc-pkg --user, or ./setup
--user for Cabal packages.

Cheers,
	Simon