[Haskell-cafe] Cabal's default install location

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 09:20 +0200, Thomas Davie wrote:
> There seems to be an assumption amongst the community that a user's  
> home directory is the most useful place for cabal to install to by  
> default.  A few people have challenged that.  I wanted to find out  
> which one most people do actually prefer, so please go and vote on  
> this poll.
> 
> http://noordering.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/cabals-default-install-location/
> 
> It's no more than a straw poll, I don't know how protected it is  
> against ballot stuffing, but I'm pretty confident that Haskellers are  
> trustworthy enough not to play with it that way.
> 
> I'll tell you all the result next week.

Thanks. If you don't mind could you also post the result in a ticket in
the Cabal/Hackage trac:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/

I don't promise that we'll respect the outcome of the vote but it could
be an interesting data point and more feedback is better than less. 

Concrete suggestions for how to improve the behaviour are also welcome.
I mean more than just "the default should be global", what do we do when
we've got a dozen packages to install, should the user have to build
them all with sudo or should we build as user and install as root,
prompting with sudo each time? For user installs our problem is that
~/.cabal/bin is not on the $PATH but it's not clear if we can symlink
into ~/bin by default. So yes, concrete suggestions for the user
interaction behaviour would be great.

Duncan