[Haskell-cafe] hellno - a somewhat different approach to tackling cabal hell

[Carter Schonwald]

perhaps the *right* solution is to view that as a bootstrap build, and then
have hellno build itself?  :)
That said, its also an executable rather than library, so its not quite the
same problem.

On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 11:15 PM, Richard Wallace <
rwallace at thewallacepack.net> wrote:

> I like the approach so far.  But hellno itself seems to have several
> dependencies itself.  So installing with cabal pulls these in as
> "fixed" libraries ("text", "mtl", "transformers", and "parsec").  Any
> plans to make these not have to be fixed? Or is there a trick I'm
> missing?
>
> On Sun, Sep 2, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Danny B <danny.b.eml at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Like many of us, I've suffered from cabal dependency hell and sought
> relief.
> >
> > I wasn't exactly happy with sandboxes - because using per-project ones
> > meant package duplication and shared sandboxes suffer from the same
> > issues as the GHC package database itself, i.e. reinstalls can break
> > other projects, etc. So I wrote hellno, which is so named because that's
> > the expression one makes when seeing cabal hell suddenly manifest itself
> > and that's also the expression one makes upon encountering yet ANOTHER
> > cabal wrapper.
> >
> > To quote the README:
> >> Generally, with hellno you'll get the same result as for blowing away
> your user
> >> package database and doing a nice clean install but without having to
> recompile
> >> everything and with ability to easily revert back and change between
> projects.
> >
> > Hellno works by keeping all the compiled packages to itself in a
> > database, so that when you ask it to bring in the dependencies of a
> > project, it will use the precompiled packages if available or install
> > the deps and save them for later reuse.
> >
> > Hellno puts symlinks in the user package database pointing to packages
> > in its storage to make them visible. Mutating the user db is hardly
> > elegant, although shouldn't result in much trouble.
> >
> > It's been working fine for me, so I figured it may be useful to others.
> > You can get hellno from GitHub:
> > https://github.com/db81/hellno
> >
> > I don't mean to say that sandboxing is inherently bad or should not be
> > used, but I guess it's better to consider more than one way.
> >
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