Working with multiple projects - haskell

For non trivial projects is commonly split it in several packages (in particular, I work usually with Visual Studio C# solutions containing 1-10 projects).
My current Haskell workflow is perform cabal clean && cabal configure && cabal install --force-reinstall for each time I modify some package that is used in another one.
That's works fine but I wish work with several Haskell projects as if only one be (ideally if A and B projects was modified then using ghci A detect changes on B).
The proposed solution (if possible) should work fine too if certain package A (in development) is shared in several "workspaces".
I looked for, but the unique related response (Haskell Cafe, Working with multiple projects 2009) suggest my current workflow as solution.
Any tutorial explaining it (workspaces, shared "in development" packages, ...) will be welcome!
Thanks a lot!!! :)
(I'm working with ghc)

So, basically you can use cabal-dev to make a local sandbox of the packages you want to use for a given project. This is will stop different projects that may have conflicting package requirements from mucking every thing up.
Here is a good post on reddit explaining the basics.
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/f3ykj/psa_use_cabaldev_to_solve_dependency_problems/

Related

What is the suggested way of setting up Haskell on Archlinux?

Long story short, I'd like some guidance on what's the (best) way to have Haskell work on Archlinux.
By work I mean all, in terms of the ghci command line tool, installing packages I don't have - such as vector-space, which this answer to a question of mine refers to -, and any other thing that could be necessary to a Haskell obstinate learner.
Archlinux wikipage on Haskell lists three (alternative?) packages for making Haskell work on the system, namely ghc, cabal-install, and stack. I have the first and the third installed on my system, but I think I must have installed the latter later (unless it's a dependency to ghc) while tampering around (probably in relation to Vim as a Haskell IDE). Furthermore, I have a huge amount of haskell-* packages installed (why? Who knows? As a learner I must have come multiple times to the point of say uh, let's try this!).
Are there any pros and cons ("cons", ahah) about each of those packages?
Can they all be used with/without conflicts?
Does any of them make any other superfluous?
Is there anything else I should be aware of which I seem apparently ignorant about based of what I've written?
Arch Linux's choice of providing dynamically linked libraries in their packages tends to get in the way if you are looking to develop Haskell code. As an Arch user myself, my default advice would be to not use Arch's Haskell packages at all, and instead to install whatever you need through ghcup or Stack, starting from the guidance in their respective project pages.
You are basically there. Try the following:
ghci: If you get the Haskell REPL then it works.
stack ghci: Again you should get the Haskell REPL. There are a lot of versions of GHC, and stack manages these along with the libraries. Whenever you use a new version of GHC stack will download it and create a local installation for you.
stack is independent of your Linux package manager. The trouble is that your distro will only have the Haskell libraries it actually needs for any applications it has integrated, and once you step outside of those you are in dependency hell with no support. So I recommend that you avoid your distro Haskell packages. stack does everything you need.
If you installed stack from your Linux package manager then you might want to uninstall it and use a personal copy (i.e. in your ~/.local directory) instead. Then you can always say stack update to check you have the latest version.
Once you have stack going, create a project by saying stack new my-project simple. Then go into the project folder and start editing. You can work with just a .hs file and GHC if you really want, but its painful; you will do much better with stack, even if you are just messing around.
You'll also need an editor. Basic functionality like syntax highlighting is available in pretty much everything, but once you get past Towers of Hanoi you are going to want something better. I use Atom with ide-haskell-ghcide. This uses the Haskell Language Server under the hood, so you will need to install that too. I know a bunch of other editors have HLS support, but I don't have experience with them.

How to manage multiple haskell installations on macOS?

I have on my computer (macOS High Sierra) multiple installations of the standard (Glasgow) Haskell compiler. The oldest one (as far as I can remember) is a minimal installation, while I obtained the most recent version form the "Platform" installer, something like five or six months ago. I'm trying to get rid of the whole ecosystem (ghc, stack, cabal, and friends), mostly because I don't know what tools I will be using in the case I'll plan to get back using the language.
So my questions are:
Where does the minimal/"Platform" installer installs Haskell and all related stuff?
How can one remove the whole Haskell language and all its components mentioned above (in the case of a "Platform" install, and even in the case of a minimal installation)?
EDIT: I've just remembered of the uninstall-hs command (see also here), should I run this instead of removing files manually?
I think I have come up with a solution and I'll answer the latter question first:
All the details I was looking for (what effectively is installed after launching the minimal / "Platform" installer, and, most importantly, where these guys were placed) can be found in the documentation welcome file at /Library/Haskell/Doc/Start.html. More precisely:
On Mac OS X, the Haskell Platform is installed in two major pieces: GHC and Haskell Platform. They are installed respectively in: /Library/Frameworks/GHC.framework and /Library/Haskell. Executables are symlinked in /usr/local/bin [...].
There are also another two or three directories in the home folder, namely ~/.ghc and ~/.stack.
As said in the OP, the script uninstall-hs done its work, showing a (at least I hope so) comprehensive list of all the files that constitutes the Haskell "sdk" actually installed.
Feel free to post your answers, I hope this post will be useful to the community.

Haskell Environment

I recently finished the book "learnyouahaskell" and now I would like to apply my acquired knowledge by building a yesod application.
However I am not sure about how to get started.
There seems to be two options on how to set up a yesod project. One is with Stack, and the other is with cabal sandboxes.
But what are the differences (If any?) and the similarities between them? Does one count as best practice whereas the other doesn't?
The yesod quickstart suggests using stack, is this fine or should I use cabal sanbox?
There are actually three different packages that are being talked about here.
cabal-install is the current stable binary to build your applications.
stack was just released to the public recently. I believe it is trying to replace cabal-install as a better, more convenient tool. At the very least, it is showing the Haskell community a different way of something things.
Cabal is the library that both cabal-install and stack are based off of.
As for the differences between the first two tools.
cabal-install is a mature application used nearly everywhere within the Haskell community (at least in open source, I have no idea what people are doing behind closed doors).
stack is still a new (at least to the public) application used in some newer projects. Some more information can be found here. But some of the highlights are:
running stack build in a projects directory will install GHC (Haskell compiler) as well as the needed dependencies for the project.
stack, by default, runs off of stackage. Which is a curated version of hackage. Meaning you can expect the different packages to play nicely with each other. Leading to reproducible builds.
You can still fall back on hackage should you choose to.
The great thing about these two applications is that they can be used by different people for the same project. If you decide you want to use cabal-install with sandboxes, and someone comes along and wants to help with your project, they can just add the files that stack needs and they can use stack while you continue to use cabal-install. Or vice-versa.
here is one persons experience after using stack for the first time. They claim that it is a little bit easier to get started because there are a couple less steps required to get started. If nothing else, people highlight the pros and cons of each tool.
Note: I'm still fairly new to Haskell, and have never actually used stack. I've actually been told to stay away from it unless building something in yesod.
Edit: As stated in a comment under this answer, I believe I have mis-represented what people have told me about stack. The comments people have given me when I asked if I should switch over to stack were more along the lines of, If you are comfortable enough using cabal sandboxes, there is no reason to switch over to stack unless you are having issues.
The lead developer of Yesod (Michael Snoyman) is actively involved with the Stack tool. So, I would recommend you to set up Yesod with Stack. Also, Yesod has a quite a complex set of dependencies and using Stackage as the default curated source, helps very much in the installation process (which Stack takes care of by default).
Also read this post for understanding the differences of Stack from cabal.

How can one make a private copy of Hackage

I'd like to snapshot the global Hackage database into a frozen, smaller one for my company's deploys. How can one most easily copy out some segment of Hackage onto a private server?
Here's one script that does it in just about the simplest way possible: https://github.com/jamwt/mirror-hackage
You can also use the MirrorClient directly from the hackage2 repo: http://code.haskell.org/hackage-server/
This is not an answer two the question in the title but an answer to my interpretation of what the OP wish to achieve.
Depending of what you want for level of stability in your production circle you can approach the problem in several ways.
I have split the dependencies in two parts, things that I can use that are in the haskell platform (keep every platform used in production) and then only use a small number of packages outside that and don't let anyone (including yourself) add more packages into your dependency tree just because of laziness (as developer). These extra packages you use some kind of script for and collect from hackage (lock to version) by using cabal fetch. Keep them safe. Create a install script that uses your safe packages and if a new machine (developer) are added to your team, use that script.
yackage is great but it all comes down to how you ship your product. If you have older versions in production you need to have a yackage setup for every version and that could be quiet annoying after a couple of years.
You can download Hackage with Voker57's hackage-mirror.sh. You'll need 'curl' for it to run. If you're using a Debian based Linux distribution, you can install curl by typing apt-get install curl.
Though it's not a segment of Hackage, I've written a bash script, that downloads the whole Hackage, what can be further easily set up as a mirror using an HTTP server. Also, it downloads all required stuff like GHC compilers ready to be used with Stack.
Currently, a complete Hackage mirror occupies ~10GiB (~100000 packages of all versions) and Stack related stuff like GHC compilers ~21GiB (~200 files). Consequent runs of the script skip already downloaded stuff, so it downloads only new one. So it's a pretty convenient way to "live offline" and sync up to date when online.

Create setup for Linux C project

I want to create a setup for my project so that it can be installed on any pc without installing the header files.
How can I do that?
There are two general ways to distribute programs:
Source Distribution (source code to be built). The most common way is to use GNU autotools to generate a configure script so that your project can be installed by doing ./configure && make install
Binary Distribution (prebuilt). Instead of shipping source, you ship binaries. There are a couple of competing standards although the two main ones are RPM and DEB file.
You just changed your question (appreciated, it was kind of vage), so my answer no longer applies ..
make sure you have a C compiler
I'd be surprised if you didn't, Linux normally has one
find an editor you are comfortable with
vi and emacs are the classics
write your first program and compile
learn about makefiles
learn about sub projects and libraries
In many respects, your question is too vague to be answerable. You will need to describe more what you have in mind. All else apart, if you are using an integrated development environment (IDE), then what you do should be coloured strongly by what the IDE encourages you to do. (Fighting your IDE is counter-productive; I've just never found an IDE that doesn't make me want to fight it.)
However, for a typical project on Linux, you will create a directory to hold the materials. For a small project (up to a few thousand lines of code in a few - say 5-20 - files), you might not need any more structure than a single directory. For bigger projects, you will segregate sub-sections of the project into separate sub-directories under the main project directory.
Depending on your build mechanisms, you may have a single makefile at the top of the project hierarchy (or the only directory in the 'hierarchy'). This goes in line with the 'Recursive Make Considered Harmful' paper (P Miller). Alternatively, you can create a separate makefile for each sub-directory and the top-level makefile simply coordinates builds across directories.
You should also consider which version control system (VCS) you will use.

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