Global spago repl

[FintanH]

Something I often do with stack is just open a terminal and do stack ghci or stack ghci --package text --package bifunctors and play around with types and what not.

This doesn't seem possible with spago at the moment, would it be worth implementing this?

[f-f]

Yeah this is a cool idea!

As it happens with stack, spago needs a package set to refer to. So it's possible to do stack ghci --package text --package bifunctors because stack has the concept of "global project".

If you want to do this with spago now you would do (assuming you want to play with bifunctors):

$ mkdir temp-whatever && cd temp-whatever
$ spago init
$ spago install bifunctors
$ spago repl

I wouldn't like to have a "global project" as stack has (the usual problem is that it's stuck on an old lts version), so a global repl could just be implemented like the above sequence of commands (but transparently to the user):

• detect if the packages.dhall is there, if not:
• make a temporary directory somewhere like /tmp (or the equivalent on windows)
• run init
• install the needed packages
• open a repl

I won't get around to do this for a while, so I'll mark it as "help needed" and I'm available to provide guidance on the implementation 🙂 (which should be fairly simple)

[f-f]

While #133 is not strictly necessay to have this, a global repl that has to download dependencies every time is not that nice, so it's better to wait for #188

[f-f]

Update: #188 went in, so this is not blocked anymore