>so many things Haskell are hard to build/install for no-good reason.
Were. Were hard. It's quite fine now with Stack. I know users of all kinds of languages that all miss Stack when they're working on their non-Haskell projects.
Were. Were hard. It's quite fine now with Stack. I know users of all kinds of languages that all miss Stack when they're working on their non-Haskell projects.
EDIT: To elaborate on why I like Stack:
+ Fully declarative. I don't run commands to edit my Stack environment, instead I modify the relevant stack.yml file. This means that the current environment can always be easily examined, committed to Git, etc.
+ Easy NixOS integration which means I can also describe the non-haskell dependencies for a project, and enforce that _absolutely_ nothing else on my system gets used. This is amazing.
+ I like that it uses Stackage by default, and that I can pin projects to LTS Stackage releases. This means that many users of my projects will probably already have most dependencies installed -- especially cool for small things like tutorials where users won't have the patience for long build times.
+ It reuses the already existing `.cabal` file format so it's easy to make libraries compatible with cabal-install, the other package manager in the Haskell ecosystem.
That said, nix-style builds don't actually address my issues with cabal-install. My (very personal) preference is to always have the current dependencies being used reflected exactly in a local file. I picked up this attitude from NixOS, but it's an extremely useful way of doing things -- the knowledge that as long as I don't lose that file I can always rebuild my current environment exactly is just too awesome.
I think that if you need to track version bounds as well (say you're developing a library) they should be kept in a separate file, and you should always have a master file that describes what you're currently using locally. Happily this is exactly what Stack does with my-project.cabal and stack.yml.
That said, I appreciate that others like cabal-install, so I do what I can to make my code easy to use with both package managers (the main thing is keeping aggressive upper bounds on the few libraries I maintain, which especially helps cabal-install users since they do dependency solving more).