Cabals' Paths_pkg and GHCi

[Simon Marlow]

Claus Reinke wrote:
>> The Paths_foo.hs file is generated in a separate directory,
>> something like dist/autogen/ (I can't remember exactly, you should
>> be able to find it).  To get GHCi to find it, you'll need to pass an
>> appropriate -i <dir> flag.
>
> a general question about cabal and ghci:
>
> if I have successfully loaded my project files into ghci,
> I've presumably
> set all the right flags and paths, for ghci.
>
> if I have successfully created a cabal project, I've presumably
> encoded all the right flags and paths, for cabal.
>
> would it be possible to add a "cabal" command to ghci, so that we
> could:
>
>     - create a cabal file for the currently loaded project
>     - load a project from a cabal file
>
> or does this make no sense? doesn't visual haskell do something
> like that, using cabal behind the scenes?

Actually I did write the code for such a thing a while back, but never finished it off.  There's a design choice; do you want

  - GHCi to understand .cabal files, or
  - Cabal to launch GHCi

I concluded that the latter would be better, because then any hooks in your Setup.hs file still work, for example.  I think this would make a nice bitesized task for someone who wants to do some Cabal hacking.

Cheers,
        Simon