cabal experiences

[Ross Paterson]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 03:58:59PM +0000, Ian Lynagh wrote:
> Here are the issues I ran into while cabalising some stuff recently.
> It's possible that some of the problems are just me failing to find the
> right option.
> 
> * No way to get extra files into the source tarball.
> 
> * No way to specify extra clean files.

The CVS version (cf http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/current/docs/Cabal/)
has extra-source-files and extra-tmp-files fields, but I don't know if
they're in a release.

> * No way to specify extra object files to be put into a library.

How are those objects generated?

> * "runghc6 Setup.hs sdist" without configuring tells me to run
>   "setup configure", but wouldn't that restrict me to a particular compiler?
>   (the same applies to clean, although it's not as critical there).

The results of configure aren't used by sdist, though they are passed
(I don't know why).  Seems to be useless but harmless.

> * I'm not sure why all cc-options can't be passed to hsc2hs with -C-optc
>   (and likewise ld-options and -L-optl).

Some C compilers don't understand -optc and -optl.