Gentoo specific
cnd opened this issue · 4 comments
I think Gentoo part should be rewritten in favor of package manager...
Specially I think this part could be removed:
cabal update
cabal install cabal-install
Once you do that, you'll want to install the additional tools alex and happy.
cabal install alex happy
Because in my opinion it's really bad suggestion. Gentoo user should explore and use package manager (there are different ways to getting newer versions of hackage packages) specially in gentoo where we have hackport and advanced Haskell packaging ecosystem. And Cabal is not a package manager
I think really good suggestions for gentoo haskell users would be #gentoo-haskell channel of Freenode and gentoo overlay (could be attached with layman -a gentoo)
stuff from wiki: http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Haskell https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Gentoo
It's pretty common to do both. To use cabal for installing alex/happy or to use your native package manager. Which makes sense really depends on context. If you're on Mac OS X, probably just use Cabal to install them and then add them to your path.
If you're on NixOS or Gentoo, it probably does indeed make more sense to use your package manager.
I am, however, anything but an expert on Gentoo. I haven't used it since 2004. I like your suggestions and if a PR implementing them looks reasonable, I'd merge it.
It's good practice to use package manager for hackage packages in Gentoo.
In case of interest: does NixOS also automatically port hackage packages to their PM?
I mentioned NixOS because they have a tendency to want their package manager to be all-encompassing for all their dependencies. This is not true of all language ecosystems or Linux distributions though. Cf. the strained relationship between Debian and the Ruby community.
I have to defer to your expertise and experience here WRT Gentoo, packaging, and Haskell. I just don't know what's considered wise/common/typical there anymore. I didn't write Haskell at the time I used Gentoo either.
on Gentoo is good practice usage of package manager and cabal sandbox