bootstrapping

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 11:33 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > > Is it still possible to upgrade an older version of Cabal (e.g.
> > > supplied with ghc-6.2) to the latest version, using only the older
> > > version of Cabal itself?
> > 
> > We've never supported building with an older version of cabal, but
> > fortunately that's never necessary since it can always self-bootstrap:
> 
> Ah, I see.  That's quite clever.  So any new version of Cabal will
> always depend on itself to install itself, ignoring any pre-existing
> version of Cabal.  So in fact, you do not even need to have Cabal
> installed already, to get started!

Yes, in fact it's actually easier when there's no existing Cabal package
since then it "Just Works"tm to do:

runghc Setup configure
runghc Setup build
etc..

although that's a tad slow since runghc has to interpret all the source
modules rather than just Setup.lhs.

IMHO it should also work when there is already a Cabal package
registered rather than us having to specify "-i.". I've not figured out
yet if thats a ghc bug or intended behaviour.

Duncan