hsenvwrapper?

[joneshf]

Is there an hsenvwrapper anywhere? My googling seemed to turn up nothing. It would be in line with virtualenvwrapper. Basically it provides some helpers to virtualenv. Making virtualenvs, removing, navigating around, etc.

If there isn't one, would there be any interest in developing one? I'm fine with kicking off development, but then I would like to think creating an hsenv organization as mentioned in Paczesiowa#40 might need to be revisited.

[tmhedberg]

To the best of my knowledge, there's nothing like that for hsenv. I wouldn't want to discourage you or anyone from building such a thing, but I wouldn't really be that interested in working on it, myself. I haven't used virtualenvwrapper, but based on a superficial glance over their docs, it doesn't seem to do anything that virtualenv/hsenv can't already do. I guess the purpose is just to present a somewhat higher-level interface to the same functionality that virtualenv already has, but I personally don't find hsenv to be inconvenient or too low-level in the first place, and I've not gotten the impression that there are a significant number of hsenv users who feel differently in that respect. Am I missing the point?

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hsenv may soon be obsolete, since Cabal 1.18 was released today with new support for sandboxing built in. Now that there is a first-class sandboxing mechanism in the tool that everyone already uses to manage Haskell projects, it's only a matter of time before there's no longer any reason for anyone to use third-party tools like hsenv or cabal-dev. Once the new version of Cabal has made its way into the Haskell Platform, there will be virtually no one who requires a separate sandboxing tool. So starting a new hsenv-related project now seems kind of pointless to me.

All that being said, I don't intend to abandon maintenance of hsenv as long as people are still using it, I just don't think that will be the case for too much longer. If you want to build an "hsenvwrapper", I'll be happy to link to it from the README and recommend it to anyone who comes looking for a high-level interface to hsenv. I would just expect a small and rapidly dwindling user base for such a tool.

[joneshf]

Oh yeah, it's definitely not a replacement for hsenv. Just provides commands that are easier to remember or that have tab completion. That's pretty much the only point to it. However, I'm very excited about cabal supporting sandboxes. At this point, I'd rather not even attempt an hsenvwrapper. Thanks for the link!