[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: Utrecht Haskell Compiler (UHC) -- first release

[Jules Bean]

Achim Schneider wrote:
> Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> 
>> This means that 'cabal
>> install' works out of the box on every system, without needing
>> admin/root privs (esp. important for students).
>>
> ...and people who were bitten by sanity and thus never, ever touch /usr
> manually, only through their distribution's package manager.

This is good advice (/usr/local is fine though). However, the point here 
is surely that the de-facto default for all other downloaded programs - 
standard makefile setups, automake, autoconf, perl package, python 
packages, graphic installers like firefox - is do to what cabal calls a 
'global' install by default.

This makes cabal's inversion of default a violation of least surprise, 
however easy it may be to justify that user installs are better.