Software Simply

DEC 2020 UPDATE: This post is mostly out of date.  The main things that cabal-meta and cabal-dev provided have now been either integrated into cabal itself or been made obsolete by subsequent improvements. In the last post we talked about basic cabal usage. That all works fine as long as you're working on a single project and all your dependencies are in hackage. When Cabal is aware of everything that you want to build, it's actually pretty good at dependency resolution. But if you have several packages that depend on each other and you're working on development versions of these packages that have not yet been released to hackage, then life becomes more difficult. In this post I'll describe my workflow for handling the development of multiple local packages. I make no claim that this is the best way to do it. But it works pretty well for me, and hopefully others will find this information helpful. Consider a situation where package B depends on package A and bo...

I've been doing full-time Haskell development for almost three years now, and while I recognize that Cabal has been painful to use at times, the current reality is that Cabal does what I need it to do and for the most part stays out of my way. In this post, I'll describe the Cabal best practices I've settled on for my Haskell development. First, some terminology. GHC is the de facto Haskell compiler, Hackage is the package database, Cabal is a library providing package infrastructure, and cabal-install is a command line program (confusingly called "cabal") for building and installing packages, and downloading and uploading them from Hackage. This isn't a tutorial for installing Haskell, so I'll assume that you at least have GHC and cabal-install's "cabal" binary. If you have a very recent release of GHC, then you're asking for problems. At the time of this writing GHC 7.6 is a few months old, so don't use it unless you know wha...

Haskell's package system, henceforth just "Cabal" for simplicity, has gotten some harsh press in the tech world recently. I want to emphasize a few points that I think are important to keep in mind in the discussion. First, this is a hard problem. There's a reason the term "DLL hell" existed long before Cabal. I can't think of any package management system I've used that didn't generate quite a bit of frustration at some point. Second, the Haskell ecosystem is also moving very quickly. There's the ongoing iteratees/conduits/pipes debate of how to do IO in an efficient and scalable way. Lenses have recently seen major advances in the state of the art. There is tons of web framework activity. I could go on and on. So while Hackage may not be the largest database of reusable code, the larger ones like CPAN that have been around for a long time are probably not moving as fast (in terms of advances in core libraries). Third, I think...