[Haskell-cafe] Using Cabal during development

[MightyByte]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 5:28 AM, Limestraël <limestrael at gmail.com> wrote:
> Eventually, I think using cabal during development may be convenient. The
> only drawback is that you have to specify each dependency...

I actually think this is a benefit, not a drawback.  In one of my
projects where I used makefiles, I was depending on a variety of
hackage projects.  I was using development code from one of these that
had not yet made it onto hackage.  There was a period of time where I
didn't do much development, and when I came back, I updated to the
most recent development code and discovered that it broke my build.
Since I didn't have all my dependencies specified and didn't know
which devel version I had been using, I was unable to build the
project until I fixed all the places where the update to the other
package broke my code.  If you are on a tight time schedule, this
could be very problematic, whereas if you had specified the
dependencies, cabal would easily be able to get the right versions for
you.