Over here, Adolfo commented:

“Hi,I tried to do follow the example, but I couldn’t even install the packages, hsx and hs-plugins were impossible. I tried with cabal and manually, and neither of those worked . any suggestion, known issue with this packages?”

I’ve been busy adding features to Turbinado and haven’t circled back around to making sure that it’s easy to build, so I can claim a lot of the blame for the build problems.  Turns out to be really important that publicly released packages are easily buildable…

Thinking back, I have really struggled to build Turbinado… and I wrote Turbinado!  Turbinado depends on some particular bugfix-ish library releases (e.g. GSomething 0.6.1). With GHC 6.10, a bunch of libraries have broken or have changed so much that they badly break Turbinado. (I need to specify better the versions in turbinado.cabal.)

At times, I’ve considered bundling the dependencies into Turbinado so that building Turbinado would be easy, but that’s always felt like a cop-out. So I’m pleading for “cabal install”. Given Turbinado’s dependence on particular versions of libraries, I would love to able to do:

cabal install turbinado
  OR  (from /home/alson/turbinado)
cabal build

Cabal Install

Most casual users of Ruby, Python, Perl, Java, etc, know that those languages have automagic build/dependencies system (respectively, gem, eggs, CPAN, maven). The tools may be of varying quality, but many tutorials include something like “First, use GEM to install the package: gem install rails” and demonstrate just how simple it is to get a useful piece of software installed.

This is not the case in Haskell. I’d guess that no more than 5% of Haskellers know about the cabal command line tool and “cabal install”. On the other hand, I’d guess that 95% of novice Rubyers know about “gem install”. These automated build/dependency system are now critical to the success of languages. As a beginner in Ruby, I always knew that I could easily try out various libraries by using GEM to install bits of software. I’m now fairly experienced with Haskell and, partly because of that experience, I don’t believe that I can easily try out various Haskell libraries.

Niklas Broberg’s HSP is a great example of the challenge of building Haskell programs. HSP is very nicely separated into modular libraries which: makes it easy to apply pieces of HSP’s functionality to a program; makes it hard for a human (at least for me) to build any one part of HSP because each part depends on so many other parts. A build/dependency tool would make HSP much easier to build into existing programs.

The Plea

I love using Haskell and Haskell will only get better if more people are able to use it. IMO, a pre-condition to the growth of the language is a solid, easy to use build/dependency system. Cabal is that system for GHC and the cabal command line tool is a key part of that system.

Unfortunately, the cabal command line tool isn’t bundled with GHC, but … Please get it, build it, use it, report any bugs, compliment the Cabal team, etc. It’ll be a great help to the Haskell community.

darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install
cd cabal-install
sh bootstrap.sh

Update: Haskell Platform

Ganesh points out the Haskell Platform Proposal, so it looks as though there is a plan to incorporate the cabal command line tool. See the following:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Platform

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Platform/FAQ

P.S. Anyone know if the cabal command line tool is going to make it into GHC?

Links to cabal install information:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/wiki/CabalInstall

http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/cabal-install

http://ghcmutterings.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/bootstrapping-cabal-install/