Building cabal with cabal fails?

[Esa Ilari Vuokko]

On 8/17/06, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
> Using GHC 6.4.2, in prepration for some cabal hacking, I decided to
> download Cabal from darcs and install it.
>
> darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/Cabal --partial
> cd Cabal
> runhaskell Setup configure
>
> And I get the error:
>
> ./Distribution/Simple.hs:61:1: lexical error
>
> Should this work? If not, what should I be doing.

Arguably, it should.  Unfortunately it doesn't.  I think this is what I do
with ghc (in Windows):

ghc -hide-all-packages -package base -package Cabal Setup.lhs -o setup

But of course that requires one cabal already installed and working.
If you have ghc 6.4.2, that should be no problem.  I think it used to
be possible just to pass -cpp and compile setup using the Distribution-
sources in tree, but that stopped working at some point.

Best regards,
--Esa