YJL

1   Rant, first

I know nothing about Haskell, but so far, after going through pages, I think its safe to say there is no such thing in Haskell world as package management, at least for GHC (Glasgow Haskell Compiler). You can install package using Cabal, but uninstall is a pain-in-the-ass, I thought Perl is annoying.

You can --unregister a package with ghc-pkg library package, not one installs executable but none of the actual library files are removed, you have to manually remove them or find some scripts to help you. And there is no --uninstall in Cabal, even it does install package for you.

Both ghc-pkg and Cabal are simply not package managers.

So, if your system package manager has Haskell packages, use it to install and uninstall system-wide. If you insist to install at user home or other places, then use Cabal sandbox. Or you can just remove the ~/.ghc and ~/.cabal once they have got too many junks, and start over.

2   Cabal sandbox

% SANDBOX=/path/to/somewhere
% export PATH="$SANDBOX/.cabal-sandbox/bin:$PATH"
% mkdir -p "$SANDBOX"
% cd "$SANDBOX"
% cabal sandbox init
% cabal install <package|path>
% <command>

% rm -rf "$SANDBOX"
# cd "$SANDBOX" && cabal sandbox delete  # $SANDBOX still exists