[Haskell-cafe] Re: Re: cabal-install

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Fri Nov 30 15:33:05 EST 2007


On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 23:56 +0100, Ben Franksen wrote:
> Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 21:00 +0100, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> >> On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 20:46 +0100, Ben Franksen wrote:
> > 
> >> > ben at sarun: .../software/haskell > cd cabal
> >> > ben at sarun: .../haskell/cabal > runhaskell Setup.lhs configure
> >> > 
> >> > Distribution/Simple/NHC.hs:77:1: lexical error at character 'i'
> >> > 
> >> > Ups.
> >> > 
> >> > Cheers
> >> > Ben (feels like a real beta-tester now ;-)
> >> 
> >> Well, Cabal cannot automatically compile itself with itself.
> > 
> > No actually it can, that was just a bug (which I've just fixed). 
> 
> Ah, I wondered. If even 'the monster' (ghc) can build itself from earlier
> versions it should be possible for cabal to pull the same trick.
> 
> > Ben is 
> > indeed being a beta tester by using Cabal HEAD. I'd recommend the 1.2
> > branch:
> 
> I was using HEAD as per Don's suggestion for how to build cabal-install.
> Now, re-reading this thread I see that you already mentioned that upgrading
> on the 2.1 branch would have been enough.
> 
> Apropos beta-testing, cabal-1.3 seems to have introduced an incompatible API
> change; for instance, it can't build MissingH any longer.

Actually it was 1.2.x that made this change.

> One install of cabal-install later: same error with MissingH. So the package
> was broken to begin with an it wasn't related to the cabal upgrade! Grrrr.

Yup. It's not been updated to work with ghc 6.8 and related libs.

> Not that it matters to me here at home (there is a debian package I can
> use), but at work we are still using debian /old-stable/ which is just a
> bit too outdated and anyway I don't have root access so I have to install
> everything from source.
> 
> Unpacking MissingH and looking at the Setup.hs I see that I can simply
> replace it by a generic version, add unix dependency to the cabal file, and
> all works well. So much for "never again runhaskell Setup blabla" ;-)

I expect it can use configurations to add the unix package dependency
conditionally and not need a custom Setup.hs file at all.

> (I should add that for many packages cabal-install works perfectly well.)
> 
> Thanks again for your help!
> 
> Cheers
> Ben
> PS: a 'cabal remove' would also be nice to have.

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/106

Duncan



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