What Python can learn from Haskell packaging

Haskell community has been living in “Cabal hell” for decades, but Stack tool and Nix language have been a great game changer for Haskell in 2015.

Python packaging has evolved since they very beginning of distutils in 1999. We’ll take a look what Haskell community has been doing in their playground and what they’ve done better or worse.

The talk is inspired by Peter Simons talk given at Nix conference: Peter Simons: Inside of the Nixpkgs Haskell Infrastructure

Outline:

• Cabal (packaging) interesting features overview
  • Cabal file specification overview
  • Interesting Cabal features not seen in Python packaging
  • Lack of features (introduction into next section)
• Cabal hell
  • Quick overview of Haskell community frustration over Cabal tooling
• Stack tool overview
  • What problem Stack solves
  • How Stack works
  • Comparing Stack to pip requirements
• Using Nix language to automate packaging
  • how packaging is automated for Haskell
  • how it could be done for Python