Glabal
Global sandboxes for Cabal
I recently moved to a new laptop and decided to rethink my GHC and
cabal setup. After installing
GHC for Mac OS X and running cabal
install cabal-install, I decided not to install any other cabal
packages globally in order to avoid
cabal hell. However, there are
a few programs I link to install globally with cabal,
e.g. pandoc. I asked
Tyler Holien what he does, and he
suggested a separate cabal sandbox for each program and a
symlink to the
resulting binary somewhere on my
$PATH.
I created a script called glabal to do the first part of this work
for me:
# ~/bin/glabal:
mkdir -p ~/.installs/$1
pushd ~/.installs/$1
cabal sandbox init
cabal install $1 -j8
popd
To use this, I type glabal pandoc and it creates a sandbox in
.installs/pandoc and attempts to install pandoc. If this doesn't
complete successfully, I either rm -r .install/pandoc or go into the
sandbox manually and attempt to recover.