It seems that every few weeks someone (who has usually either just started to use Haskell or doesn’t seem to be active in the Haskell community) comes out with the fallacy that Cabal is the “Haskell package manager”. I’ve gotten sick of replying why this isn’t the case on IRC, blog comments, etc. that I’ve decided to write a blog post to set things straight.
Disclaimer: I am not a Cabal developer (I did submit a patch or two to fix a couple of documentation problems I found, but I don’t know if they were applied or if they were re-written, etc.) so this is not the official line, just my own opinion (hmmm… “IANACD” doesn’t quite trip off the tongue…).
Cabal /= cabal-install
First of all, there is the common misconception that Cabal provides the command line tool cabal
. This is not the case: this tool is provided in the cabal-install package. This unfortunately (for comprehension’s sake) named tool is completely distinct from Cabal-the-library except for the fact that it uses that library. To help understand why there is this distinction (as opposed to other language-specific installation tools such as RubyGems), I highly recommend this video by Duncan Coutts. The short version is: Cabal depends directly on Haskell compilers and nothing else (and is indeed shipped with GHC); cabal-install needs other packages (for network access, etc.) as well.
For the rest of this blog post, I will assume that people are instead referring to cabal-install as a package manager (which is what most of them intend) or else the entire Hackage ecosystem (see below).
What is a package manager?
According to that most authoritative source Wikipedia, a Package management system (of which a package manager is merely one component, namely the tool that is used) is:
… a collection of tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages from a computer.
Coupled with such a tool is also a large (well, it could be small but that kind of defeats the point) collection of packages used by the package manager. Together, these provide a way of (hopefully) seamlessly installing packages without end users having to consider what is needed to do so. For example, let us assume that a Gentoo user with no other Haskell-related software present is wishing to install XMonad (one of the most popular pieces of software written in Haskell). In that case, all they need to do is:
emerge xmonad
This will bring in GHC and all other related dependencies (even non-Haskell ones!) so that the user doesn’t have to worry about all that kind of stuff.
The Haskell “Package Management System”
The “equivalent” to a package management system for Haskell is the Hackage ecosystem: HackageDB + Cabal + cabal-install, which provide the list of packages, the build system and the command line tool respectively. However, this ecosystem is not a package management system:
HackageDB
HackageDB is the central repository of open-source Haskell software. However, it is limited solely to Haskell software that is installed using Cabal. As such, it is not closed under the dependency relation: entering the incantation cabal install xmonad
into a prompt on a Haskell-free system will not bring in first GHC and then all other dependencies (actually, it is not even possible to utter that incantation since neither Cabal nor cabal-install will be available, unless a pre-built cabal-install is being used). Furthermore, for any GUI libraries/applications that use the Gtk2Hs wrapper library around Gtk+, then Hackage will also be unable to install those packages (to the great confusion of many who state that they do indeed have gtk+ installed, when Cabal and cabal-install are complaining about the gtk+ sub-library from Gtk2Hs) since it isn’t Cabalised.
As such, HackageDB cannot really fulfill the requirements of being a proper component of a package management system.
Cabal
Cabal is the Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries, which not only acts as the build system (analogous to ./configure && make && make install
) of choice for Haskell packages, but also provides this metadata information to other libraries and applications that need it via a library interface. Nowadays, the only mainstream Haskell packages that don’t use Cabal are GHC itself (since it contains non-Haskell components; furthermore this would involve bootstrapping issues since a Haskell compiler is needed to build Cabal) and “legacy” libraries and tools such a Gtk2Hs (for which it is currently not possible to build using the Cabal framework for various reasons).
Cabal obtains its information from two two files:
- A
.cabal
file that contains a human-readable description of the package including dependencies, exported modules, any libraries and executables it builds, etc. - A
Setup.[l]hs
file that is a valid Haskell program/script using the Cabal and which performs the actual configuration, building and installation of the package; for most packages this is a mere two lines long (one to import the Cabal library, the second that states that it uses the default build setup).
As such, Cabal is extremely elegant, especially when compared to ones such as Ant. However, it is not a valid specification format for packages that are part of a fully-fledged package management system: it cannot deal with all possibilities (e.g. Gtk2Hs) nor all dependencies (it allows you to state any C libraries needed at build time, but not for any libraries needed from other languages nor any other tools or libraries needed at run-time; for example my graphviz library for Haskell really needs the “real” Graphviz tool suite installed to work properly but there is no way of telling Cabal that).
Why not XML?
Some people have stated that Cabal should really switch to an XML-based file format because it is a “standard”. Even if we assume that XML really is such a well-defined standard (though we’d need to define a Schema for use with Cabal), XML has one large failing: it is not human readable. One of the greatest features of Cabal is that its file format is perfectly readable and understandable by humans (even if it is at times imprecisely defined in some aspects), such that if I have to check dependencies, etc. for a Cabalised package I can quickly skim through its .cabal file and just read it without having to decode it (especially since usage of XML would remove any need for newlines, etc. which are used for readability purposes). Furthermore, it would require Cabal to use an XML parser, which means an extra dependency (whereas at the moment it needs only a compiler).
cabal-install
The choice of both package and executable name for cabal-install was unfortunate (if understandable) in that too many people confuse it for Cabal. Whilst it may use Cabal and act as a wrapper around both it and HackageDB, it is indeed a completely separate package. So remember, whilst you may do cabal install xmonad
, you’re not using Cabal to do that but rather cabal-install.
cabal-install brings a convenient command-line interface, dependency resolution and downloading to the Hackage ecosystem. Assuming that you have GHC install, cabal install xmonad
will indeed determine, download and build all Haskell dependencies for XMonad. However, this is not always the case.
As a wrapper around Cabal and HackageDB, cabal-install inherits all of their reasons why it is not a valid package manager. However, to that it brings in a few warts of its own: it only manages libraries. That doesn’t mean that it can’t install applications, because it can; it’s just that once it has installed an application it can’t tell that it has done so. That’s because rather than have its own record of what it has installed and what is available, cabal-install uses GHC’s library manager ghc-pkg
to determine which libraries are installed. Since GHC doesn’t know which applications are installed, neither does cabal-install. As such, if one tries to install haskell-src-exts (or any package that depends upon it) on a “virgin” Haskell system, then it will fail since the parser generator happy isn’t installed. cabal-install (or rather Cabal) can detect if happy is available, but will not automatically offer to download and install it for you. Whilst this might be more a temporary limitation (in the sense that no-one has yet added support for build-time tools to cabal-install’s dependency resolution system) rather than a problem with cabal-install, it still requires extra user intervention.
There is a yet more serious impediment to being able to properly consider cabal-install a package manager (since other package managers may also require user intervention at times when installation fails for some reason). Let us once again consider that definition of a package management system, this time with some emphasis added:
… a collection of tools to automate the process of installing, upgrading, configuring, and removing software packages from a computer.
Did everyone spot that not-so-subtle hint? cabal-install can’t un-install Haskell software. Why not? Partially because Cabal doesn’t support uninstallation: whilst Cabal can un-register a library from ghc-pkg, it won’t remove any files it installed. Furthermore, because cabal-install doesn’t track which applications it has installed, it is definitely unable to uninstall them since it has no idea which files it needs to delete.
Partially linked to this problem of uninstallation is another segment of that definition: upgrading. Whilst it can install a new version of a package, it cannot remove old versions. However, this isn’t why the cabal upgrade
option has been disabled: GHC ships with several libraries upon which it itself depends upon; these are known as the boot libraries. Originally cabal-install offered to upgrade these libraries, with at times disastrous results.
But what if we fix cabal-install???
What if cabal-install starts recording which packages it installs and which files it installs? With that uninstallation will be possible, and if it can tell which libraries are boot libraries then upgrading should also be possible. As such, cabal-install could be considered a proper package management system, couldn’t it? Pretty please?
Unfortunately, no: as mentioned earlier, between them HackageDB and Cabal can only be used to install packages written in Haskell that are cabalised. As such packages cannot be closed under dependencies and cabal-install cannot install all necessary dependencies (both build-time and run-time).
Why you should use your distribution’s package management system
Many GNU/Linux users in the Haskell community express disdain for their distribution’s package management system and vehemently express their preference of cabal-install. Here are several reasons, however, that you should use your distribution’s package management system:
- Proper dependencies: system packages can bring in all required dependencies, no matter what language they were written in, etc. How are they able to do this when cabal-install can’t? Because they are (hopefully) checked by the most clever computational device known: the human brain. Good system packages have all dependencies listed explicitly, and in the case of those that are marked as “stable” are usually tested on a larger number of machines, architectures and software configurations than the upstream developer is capable of.
- Package patching: a common complaint with the current status of HackageDB and Cabal is that if there is a mistake with a package’s .cabal file (usually due to package maintainers being either too strict or too lax in terms of dependency version ranges), then users are forced to either manually download, edit and install (thus losing cabal-install’s dependency resolution) those packages or else wait for the package maintainer to release an update. System packages, however, are able to work around these problems by either providing ready-built binary versions of those packages or else patching the package to get it working. For example, when the duplicated instance problem arose between yi and data-accessor, I was able to edit the yi ebuild to remove its own instance definition so that it would clash with data-accessor’s: as such, Gentoo users who wanted to install yi wouldn’t even know such a problem existed, which is how it should be.
- It Just Works: linked to the above point, system packages are more likely to install and work on the first attempt than using cabal-install, because they have (hopefully) been tested to do so within that particular distribution. This also includes choosing the correct compile-time flags, etc.
- Integration: when using system packages, the Haskell packages you have installed are first class citizens of your machine, just like every other package. Applications are installed into standard directories, as are libraries, documentation, etc. They will also interact with all the other packages on your system better: for example, there are various wrapper scripts that come with different packages that wrap around darcs; by using a system install of darcs then these wrapper scripts will work, whereas they might not if it’s installed in your home directory.
- Done for you: someone has put in the effort to write the system package for that particular Haskell package; why shouldn’t you be grateful for them for doing so and use it?
There are of course various reasons why people prefer not to use system packages for Haskell packages:
- Out of date packages;
- Limited variety of packages;
- Not built with the wanted options.
However, there are two possible solutions to these problems. The first one is that if you are a serious Haskell hacker and your distribution doesn’t support Haskell well, then why not try another distribution? Arch and Gentoo are usually recognised as being those with the best Haskell support, with Fedora seeming to have decent Haskell support for a more release- and ready-to-go-oriented distribution.
Alternatively, get more involved with your distribution’s Haskell packaging team or start one if there isn’t one there already: get what you want in your distribution and help other people out at the same time. It usually isn’t hard to at least make unofficial packages: I started off writing Haskell ebuilds for Gentoo by copying and editing ones that were already there; nowadays we have our hackport tool (available at app-portage/hackport
in the Haskell overlay) that generates most of the ebuild for you, especially for simple packages that don’t need much tweaking. Failing that, just ask for a new/updated Haskell package.
So is cabal-install useless?
Not at all: cabal-install still serves four useful purposes:
- Building and testing your own packages during development;
- On OSs without a package management system (e.g. Windows);
- You are unable to use your system’s package manager for some reason (e.g. need a custom build with different compile-time flags);
- You are unable to install system-wide packages on your work/university computer (which is the situation I face at uni, unless I take the “manage your own computer and if it breaks don’t come to us crying” approach).
However, I still strongly recommend you use your system package manager whenever possible.
Conclusion
I have tried to set out at least some of my reasonings about why I believe that cabal-install is not a package manager like so many people seem to believe, and that the Hackage ecosystem overall is not a valid package management system. Furthermore, I have covered why I believe Cabal should not switch to XML-based files for its metadata and why you should strongly consider using your OS’s package management system (if it has one) over installing packages by hand with cabal-install.
If nothing else, it is my sincere hope that this blog post will at least stop people talking about Cabal when they mean cabal-install.