Cabal vs LuaRocks (Was: [hack] nil.foo = nil)

[Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@...>]

2014-05-02 5:58 GMT+02:00 Andrew Starks <andrew.starks@trms.com>:

> "What Would Haskel Do?"

I know almost no Haskell, even though I once wrote a 100-line Haskell
code file that did something useful (92 lines in it were the same as an
existing file by an expert).

But I use `anansi` and `pandoc`, so I have a superficial knowledge of
the Haskell package (shortened to 'hackage)' installer Cabal. It's
roughly halfway between Debian's APT and LuaRocks in terms of
features, but somehow I find "cabal" much less prone to kick me in
the teeth.

I've been wondering why. Possible reasons include:

1. Haskell is in practice no more an evolving language than C is,
whereas Lua has gone through a breaking change in its basic package
management system from 5.1 to 5.2.
2. Pandoc is unusually well tested, being written and maintained by
a superman who hunts down errors in the twenty-odd other packages
on which it depends, and having its own mailing list which is
sometimes [1] almost as active as all of lua-l.
3. The Hackage repository has quality control.New packages only
have candidate status, packages that are not good enough any more
get deprecated and eventually removed.

If the real reason is 1 or 2, we can't do much about it. If it is 3, we can.

[1] When we don't have a pre-release buzz like now.