> Ideally, getting a basic setup going shouldn't take a
> deep-read of the docs of my package manager.
>Please name one package manager which installs binaries to the user's home directory, but doesn't require updating the user's $PATH.
Do you even realize how little those two statements follow each other? The whole red herring argument here is kind of annoying, but I'll hit it anyways- every package manager that I've used which installs binaries (or anything, really) in the user's home directory (or any directory really) does make me update the path- but it also tells me this and gives me sane errors when that hasn't happened.
2. Ivy/Maven. Dependencies are placed in ~/.ivy, and are available for use without changing environment variables.
3. rubygems. A ~/.gems directory is created that provides dependencies by ruby version, if you wish.
Now, running a clis still requires an addition to path. But package managers do exist that organize dependencies on the user path without explicit environment variable edition.
The problem he reports is that when he upgrades the Cabal binary by running 'cabal install cabal-install', the sequence of events is:
1. The system runs /usr/bin/cabal
2. Cabal fetches and builds the new binary
3. The new binary is installed to $HOME/.cabal/bin/
4. When he runs 'cabal update' again, it still uses /usr/bin/cabal because $HOME/.cabal/bin/ is not on his $PATH
Contrary to the thesis of the post, the haskell community seems to be well aware of this, and there are several attempts to fix it being actively worked on, just nothing particularly standardized yet. Meanwhile, cabal-dev lets people get work done.