My biggest problem with Haskell right now is package and dependency management.
Cabal along with the Haskell Platform are supposed to address this, but it seems like every time I want to install a new package I run into tons of dependency issues.
Currently I’m playing around with this SDL tutorial. When I tried to:
cabal install base
I got this:
Resolving dependencies... cabal: internal error: impossible
After googling around, I thought maybe the problem was that I’m running ghc 6.10.3 (the version I got by installing the Haskell Platform on Ubuntu) instead of the latest 6.12.1.
I’m still not even sure this is the reason for Cabal’s cryptic error, but trying to install 6.12 on Ubuntu is turning out to be a chore. After more googling, I came across this guide: Installation of GHC 6.12.1 on Ubuntu 9.10 (for Hubris)
If that document doesn’t convince you that Haskell has some installation and dependency management ugliness, I don’t know what will.
Maybe after I get more used to the Haskell ecosystem I’ll understand these things more intuitively. Right now, though, this whole affair is quite frustrating.
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Update: Since writing this, I’ve tried installing the same package in OS X. The Haskell Platform contains GHC 6.12.1, but the version of Cabal I had installed doesn’t work with 6.12.x. So, I upgraded Cabal and…
RMBP:bin rdickerson$ ./cabal install base Resolving dependencies... cabal: Distribution/Client/Dependency/TopDown.hs:171:37-73: Non-exhaustive patterns in lambda
This is really awful.