CODEWITHSUNDEEP
haskelldynamic-linkingcabal
amindfv
amindfv

Reputation: 8448

Reasons not to enable shared library support in Cabal

I'm looking to install Hubris for a Ruby-to-Haskell bridge.

Recent install instructions say that I need to enable shared library support in Cabal. Are there reasons why I might not want to do that?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 459

Answers (1)

Joachim Breitner
Joachim Breitner

Reputation: 25782

One reason is that when you build binaries using shared Haskell libraries, these are affected by any future breakage of your locally installed Haskell packages. In other words, when you upgrade a library, you will have to either keep the old .so files around or rebuild the program. This is the main reason why Debian is not yet providing -dyn packages for any library besides the set of boot packages.

(The fact that cabal-install does not uninstall stuff helps here a bit, I guess. But nevertheless I prefer not to worry that doing something with cabal-install or in .cabal might break existing programs.

Upvotes: 3

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