RFC: include a cabal-install executable in future GHC releases

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

I feel this blurs the roles of GHC and the Platform.

Can't the cabal-install that comes with the Platform can be used with a
later GHC installation? If that's correct, then the only use case that
this proposal covers is someone who wants to use a bleeding edge GHC and
no other version on a new machine. A separate binary distribution of
cabal-install should be more than adequate for that and it avoids
coupling GHC to other things.

So a weak -1.


On 20/01/2014 00:02, Carter Schonwald wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> 
> I'd like to propose that GHC releases 7.8.1 onwards include a
> cabal-install (aka cabal) executable, but not include the library deps
> of cabal-install that aren't already distributed with ghc.(unless ghc
> should have those deps baked in, which theres very very good reasons not
> to do.). 
> 
> currently if someone wants just a basic haskell install of the freshest
> ghc  they have to install a ghc bindist, then do a boostrap build of
> cabal-install by hand (if they want to actually get anything done :) ). 
> 
> This is not a human friendly situation for folks who are new to haskell
> tooling, but want to try out haskell dev on a server style vm or the like! 
> 
> point being: It'd be great for haskell usability (and egads amounts of
> config time, even by seasoned users) the ghc bindists / installers
> included a cabal-install binary
> 
> thoughts?
> -Carter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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