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    Give me back my sanity haskell linux rant release virtualization gist.github.com
    daGrevis avatar via daGrevis 8 years ago |
    Archive.org Archive.today Ghostarchive
    | 7 comments
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    apy avatar apy 8 years ago | link

    One upside to Nix, while it has some drawbacks, is that I’ve found updating packages very straight forward and easy. I just fork the repo, copy the existing package, and install from the fork. You don’t have to learn anything other than that, because the packages describe how to build the package rather than just being binary artifacts.

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      puffnfresh avatar puffnfresh 8 years ago | link

      Took me 10 seconds to get Pandoc on my PATH with Nix:

      nix-shell -p haskellPackages.pandoc

      Latest released version, no compilation, just 10 seconds of downloading binaries. It gets harder when the package is not in nixpkgs, but cabal2nix might generate a usable Pandoc definition.

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        bitemyapp avatar bitemyapp 8 years ago | link

        cabal2nix might generate a usable Pandoc definition.

        I’m fond of Nix, but that’s a pretty hopeful might. I got usable nix files out of cabal2nix without modification 0% of the time I tried it for various libraries and binaries.

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          puffnfresh avatar puffnfresh 8 years ago | link

          Worked for me:

          % cabal2nix --jailbreak cabal://pandoc > pandoc.nix
% nix-shell -E "(import <nixpkgs> {}).haskellPackages.callPackage ./pandoc.nix {}"
$ unpackPhase
$ cd pandoc-1.13.1
$ eval "$configurePhase"
$ cabal build
$ dist/build/pandoc/pandoc --version
pandoc 1.13.1

          Best part was that the dependencies were all binary, compilation was only of Pandoc.

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            bitemyapp avatar bitemyapp 8 years ago | link

            I have the worst luck with these things :(

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      bitemyapp avatar bitemyapp edited 8 years ago | link

      7.0.x is an antediluvian version of GHC. Baffling how anybody can tolerate such ancient packages on CentOS/RHEL.

      I’ve pinged the Cabal elves about getting the binary into the path by default. We’ll see how it shakes out.

      There’s not a lot else here for the Haskell community to address, broken packaging on the part of your distro isn’t something we can fix.

      This is what the instructions usually look like: http://new-www.haskell.org/downloads/linux

      Nix has top-notch support for language-specific dependencies (Python, Scala, Haskell, etc.)

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        peter avatar peter 8 years ago | link

        There’s not a lot else here for the Haskell community to address, broken packaging on the part of your distro isn’t something we can fix.

        That’s basically what I took from this post as well. CentOS is for people who want to run PHP sites on a stable OS version so they don’t have to touch anything ever. Perhaps it has other utility, but I’m dubious.