Haskell Best Practices for Avoiding "Cabal Hell"
DEC 2020 UPDATE: A lot has changed since this post was written. Much of "cabal hell" is now a thing of the past due to cabal's more recent purely functional "nix style" build infrastructure. Some of the points here aren't really applicable any more, but many still are. I'm updating this post with strikethroughs for the points that are outdated. I posted this as a reddit comment and it was really well received, so I thought I'd post it here so it would be more linkable. A lot of people complain about "cabal hell" and ask what they can do to solve it. There are definitely things about the cabal/hackage ecosystem that can be improved, but on the whole it serves me quite well. I think a significant amount of the difficulty is a result of how fast things move in the Haskell community and how much more reusable Haskell is than other languages. With that preface, here are my best practices that seem to make Cabal work pretty well for me in...