Cabal VS stackage

Also, there's already a cabal RFC to support toml: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7548

Cabal has a lot of dark corners once you stray from the happy path. Just checked and I'm currently subscribed to 37 threads on the issue tracker, and I'm not a maintainer. A lot of these are related to lesser-used features like cabal scripts, environment files and doctests (though I think all of these things would used more if they were more reliable), but there's also plenty of stupid stuff like: - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/3313 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8527 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8391 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/7789 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6888 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6999 - https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/5271

By the way, there are some open issues for the command to add a package in Cabal.

That's interesting. Could you could open a an issue about this? https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues

At the moment, cabal-install doesn't support hpack natively but if the project can be build with cabal-install, you can run hpack manually to produce the .cabal file and utilise dr-cabal after that :)

Hm thanks for that, could try out some of those ideas. Here's the github issue i opened for this: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8580

Would really love it if the Cabal documentation had this as its own, highly visible entry. I submitted a pull request to that end.

Sometimes cabal's output is confusing with regards to optimization levels: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/6221

Direct link to changelog: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/blob/master/release-notes/cabal-install-3.8.1.0.md

> That is fine, as far as it goes, but obviously this will, at some point, be at odds with the interests of programmers looking to use Haskell as a practical, stable tool.

That's what Stackage is.

Stackage provides consistent sets of Haskell packages, known to build together and pass their tests before becoming Stackage Nightly snapshots and LTS (Long Term Support) releases. [1]

Java will never get this.

[1] https://www.stackage.org/

makefile_dir := $(dir $(abspath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))) export PATH := $(makefile_dir):$(PATH) project_name ?= project_main ?= src/.hs retag_file ?= $(project_main) stack.yaml: @test -f stack.yaml || (echo -e "This makefile requires a 'stack.yaml' for your project.\nYou don't need to use 'stack' to build your project.\nYou just need a 'stack.yaml' specifying a resolver compatible with your GHC version.\nSee https://www.stackage.org/" && exit 1) stack: stack.yaml @which stack || (echo -e "This makefile requires 'stack' to be on your path. Use GHCup to install it.\nSee https://www.haskell.org/ghcup/" && exit 1) .PHONY: stack warning.txt: -@uname -a | grep -q Darwin && echo "WARNING: On Mac, you must alias 'make' to 'gmake' in your shell config file (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc). Symbolic links will not work." | tee warning.txt @echo "Add 'warning.txt' to your .gitignore file if you never want to see this message again." hasktags: warning.txt stack @echo 'stack exec -- hasktags' > hasktags @chmod +x hasktags @echo "You might like to add 'hasktags' to your .gitignore file." format: stack @stack exec -- fourmolu --stdin-input-file $(project_main) .PHONY: format retag: warning.txt stack @stack exec -- haskdogs -i $(retag_file) --hasktags-args "-x -c -a" | sort -u -o tags tags .PHONY: retag tags: warning.txt hasktags stack @stack exec -- haskdogs .PHONY: tags ghcid: stack @stack exec -- ghcid \ --command 'stack repl --ghc-options "-fno-code -fno-break-on-exception -fno-break-on-error -v1 -ferror-spans -j"' \ --restart stack.yaml \ --restart $(project_name).cabal \ --warnings \ --outputfile ./ghcid.txt .PHONY: ghcid

(why lts-18.28? it's the latest 8.10 release on https://www.stackage.org/ )

I don't see way community maintenance can change the GHC for nightly.

It makes total sense that it fails since at no point I requested that the library be installed, which makes me wonder: Is there any way to request Hackage to install SDL and GLEW before attempting the build? I see Stackage has debian-bootstrap.sh. Does something similar exist for Hackage?

On the contrary, I think this is standard practice for packages which are part of stackage. When stackage nightly switches to a new version of ghc, all the packages which are incompatible with the new ghc are dropped from nightly. My understanding is that maintainers are then expected to fix their packages, at which point more and more packages are included in the nightly snapshot. The next lts to include that version of ghc is only released later, once most packages have been added back, so unlike ghc users who diligently upgrade to the latest ghc, stackage users who diligently upgrade the latest lts snapshot shouldn't see a big drop in the number of compatible packages.

I found the latest stack lts version, and it's associated ghc version here: https://www.stackage.org/

This is a common misconception, the packages in Stackage are only required to build together and pass their own test suite (if present, and this is also not a hard requirement), and also anyone can add packages. Quality assurance/selecting "blessed" packages is not part of the design of Stackage.

I will say that perhaps upper-bounds shouldn't (or rarely) exist? Smarter people than me have probably discussed it to death. But upper-bounds aside, different packages working together is a property of those packages, not of whatever tool happens to build them, so package inconsistency or "cabal hell" should naturally arise from any tool that actually checks if two packages have declared themselves as mutually incompatible... https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stackage/issues/3241