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<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 2:41 AM, John Meacham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:john@repetae.net">john@repetae.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div class="Ih2E3d">On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:41:42PM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:<br>> john:<br>> > On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 07:20:12PM -0800, Jason Dagit wrote:<br>> > > I spoke with the author of the fork a bit in IRC around the time it happened<br>
> > > and my understanding is that:<br>> > > 1) John sternly objects to using cabal as the build system for JHC<br>> ><br>> > This is a fairly silly reason to fork a project, especially jhc, for a<br>
> > number of reasons.<br>><br>> One of the reasons though, for the branching, is that the potential<br>> developers, who all have Haskell toolchains, couldn't do:<br>><br>> $ cabal install jhc<br>
><br>> Then now can, but have to write 'lhc' instead of 'jhc'.<br>><br>> We've probably just increased the jhc "alpha user" base 10 fold. Hooray!<br><br></div>Except that for all those systems that can use cabal, ./configure &&<br>
make install would have already worked perfectly. So in actuality my<br>alpha user base drops 50-fold.<br><br>Also, I am not so sure who these people are who are willing to type 10<br>characters to try out jhc, but not a dozen more. I mean, a few typos and<br>
there won't be enough keystrokes in their budget to compile hello world,<br>let alone provide a bug report or send a patch :)<br><br><br>I think you are overestimating the penetration of cabal or<br>underestimating the size and diversity of the haskell user base. There<br>
are a whole lot of people out there who just want to use haskell and<br>don't keep up with the IRC channels or the mailing lists. Grad students<br>interested in some aspect of jhcs design who did apt-get install ghc<br>
and then expect jhc to work. Sysadmins who manage clusters of computers<br>for work but have no particular attachement to haskell whose kickstart<br>scripts allow just dropping in an autoconfed tarball but have to be<br>retooled for something new?<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br><br>> Integrating into the ecology of the vast majority of Haskell code is a<br>> good way to get and keep developers. And since GHC -- which we need to<br>> build JHC anyway -- already ships with Cabal, no additional dependencies<br>
> are required.<br><br></div>But wouldn't it be nicer if Haskell fit into the ecology of OSS in<br>general? Even better wouldn't it be nice if peoples first impression of<br>haskell was not annoyance at having to build a package in some<br>
proprietary way , but rather being impressed with some piece of software<br>and looking into its implementation and seeing how it got to be so good?<br>No one when just trying to install a random program not knowing anything<br>
about the implementation gets excited at seeing that they have to learn<br>some brand new way of getting it to work.<br><br>For a standalone program like jhc, integrating with the open source<br>community as a whole, and having the flexibility of working with the<br>
right tool for the task at hand are very desirable things.<br><br>When it comes down to it, an actual reason to use cabal is not there, If<br>the reason is to fit into the ecology of Haskell code, then my question<br>is why is this ecology so distinct to begin with? What is wrong with<br>
haskell such that its world must be so disjoint from that of other<br>languages? That seems to be the real WTF here that needs fixing.</blockquote>
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<div>When it comes down to it, I've just been down a slippery slope.</div>
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<div>The fact is, hackage works and hackage is a good reason to support cabal.</div>
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<div>I'd also so say this thread is no longer productive. A fork happened, the fork embraces cabal but jhc does not need to embrace cabal; end of story really. We all get what we want.</div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Jason</div></div>