"Is cabal-install stable enough yet that GHC should be inflicting it on newbies?"

[hasufell]

@Bodigrim

I wonder whether people so fervently arguing in favor of sandboxes actually used them while they were available in Cabal. Because in my experience sandboxes were very annoying to manage, and the moment Stack arrived in 2015 it won the market overnight by obliterating them with “nix-style builds”, similar in spirit to what cabal v2-build introduced couple of years later.

I’ve used sandboxes for a long time and so do other languages.

But let’s see what’s wrong with v2 first:

• cabal install --lib is a re-introduction of cabal hell
• it does not support ad-hoc development easily, unless you
  • learn about store-dir
  • learn about ghc environment files
  • learn why cabal and ghc don’t “see” the same package lists
  • learn about nix-store/CAS
  • learn all the hidden v2 switches and understand how to combine them

It is so bad UX that, well, compiler/language developers have to ask how to use it.

It doesn’t support Makefile workflows or similar ones (such as copilot) properly.

I’m not suggesting v2 is useless. No. But we need to recognize that the current UX is insufficient.