[Haskell-cafe] Cabal.exe is available from http://haskell.org/~duncan/cabal/, but is not included in the latest cabal-install tool (version 0.6.0).

[Benjamin L.Russell]

I just tried to install the cabal-install tool (version 0.6.0) (see
http://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html) on Windows XP, Service
Pack 2, but when I followed the instructions on the download page and
downloaded cabal-install-0.6.0.tar.gz, the gunzipped untarred
cabal-install-0.6.0 directory did not include cabal.exe.

Further, according to the bundled README file:

>Quickstart on Windows systems
>-----------------------------
>
>For Windows users we hope to provide a pre-compiled `cabal.exe` program shortly.
>In the mean time you have to build the three dependencies in [the standard way].
>
>[the standard way]:
>  http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal/How_to_install_a_Cabal_package

Running the bundled bootstrap.sh file in Cygwin resulted in an
installation error.

However, when I then visited the above-mentioned HaskellWiki page, I
discovered that cabal.exe, in fact, already existed:

>... Windows users can download a binary (cabal.exe) from here.

("Here" currently references http://haskell.org/~duncan/cabal/.)

Apparently, this cabal.exe file is in fact the complete cabal-install
tool (version 0.6.0) itself:

(After adding the cabal.exe installation directory to the path:)

>C:\Documents and Settings\Benjamin>cabal --version
>cabal-install version 0.6.0
>using version 1.6.0.1 of the Cabal library

To facilitate installation for Windows users, perhaps cabal.exe should
be bundled with cabal-install-0.6.0.tar.gz, and the README file
updated?

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
Benjamin L. Russell  /   DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com
http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/
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