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

[Achim Schneider]

"Richard O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

> On 21 Apr 2009, at 11:36 pm, Achim Schneider wrote:
> 
> > "Richard O'Keefe" <ok at cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
> >  
> >> Some of the right questions are
> >>  - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have  
> >>    <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have  
> >>    administrator access to?
> >>  
> > Irrelevant.  
> 
> How van the question that is the very heart of this thread
> be "irrelevant"?
> 
> This is precisely the situation I'm in, and it's precisely
> the class of users I'm arguing for.
> 
> I'm encouraged by the constructive suggestions of package
> tools (nix, portage) that are said to address some of these
> issues.  Except of course that I have to install them first...
>
It's irrelevant, because I _do_ have root access to my machine, but
don't want to get forced into using it by a question that implies that
if you have access, you're going to use it. I didn't mean to nit pick,
though, I thought you were arguing for the other side...

I think the right question is "how many people prefer user installs
over system installs, wrt. their hackage packages?". 

I estimate that, concerning developers, who are used to install
still-buggy, self-written libraries, as well as install things while
working, the percentage is very, very high: At least I don't want my
workflow to be broken to deal with the formal requirements of a global
install while developing, and I guess many others feel the same way.[1]

Endusers, of course, might have other preferences, but cabal doesn't
(IMHO) cater to them, directly: It caters to distribution packages (or
windows installers, or whatever), so cabal's default behaviour is quite
irrelevant for those cases.

[1] Thinking of it... is there a way to tell cabal to pretend a package
    is installed by giving the path to it's source directory? Just like
    include directories, but with packages.

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