August 2008 - cabal-devel

patch applied (cabal-branches/cabal-1.4): Don't try to install libHSfoo.a if the lib had no object files
by Duncan Coutts 04 Aug '08

04 Aug '08

Mon Aug 4 08:14:42 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Don't try to install libHSfoo.a if the lib had no object files To allow meta-packages. (Backport of equivalent patch in Cabal HEAD) M ./Distribution/Simple/GHC.hs -5 +7 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-branches/cabal-1.4/_darcs/patches/2008080415…

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Re: Where should cabal install to by default?
by Justin Bogner 04 Aug '08

04 Aug '08

Roman Leshchinskiy wrote: > On 04/08/2008, at 06:19, Duncan Coutts wrote: > >> And many new users don't know what a path is or how to change one. >> >> I'd like to avoid new users seeing: >> >> $ cabal install xmonad >> cabal: this didn't do what you expected, to fix it change the foo >> setting in your bar file. >> >> It's not friendly. >> >> Actually at the moment it's worse though: >> $ cabal install xmonad >> [.. lots of build output .. ] >> $ xmonad >> bash: xmonad: command not found >> # user gives up, assuming cabal is borked > > I don't think it's realistic to expect that things will magically work > for people who don't know what they are doing. In fact, I can't imagine > that there are a lot of people who would use cabal-install and not know > about paths. IMO, the goal should rather be to make installation simple > for those who do know what they are doing and also to prevent users from > shooting themselves in the foot as much as possible. > > That said, I would prefer installs to be global by default and to go > into the same directory/tree in which cabal-install itself lives. Also, > I don't think cabal-install itself should somehow invoke sudo. IMO, > local installs shouldn't have a default location; rather, the user would > be required to specify one in the prefs file or when invoking > cabal-install. > > Roman I agree with Roman. Programs should not invoke sudo for users (If I need root access, I want to ask for it), and the default should be global rather than guessing a local path. With these two together you get a much deserved permission error if you simply run the program without configuring it or explicitly using root, which is the same as most other install tools and very sane, in my opinion. _____ Justin Bogner

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Where should cabal install to by default?
by Duncan Coutts 03 Aug '08

03 Aug '08

Hi folks, cabal-install is supposed to make things simpler for users, especially new users. It's partly successful at that currently. Many users do not know ghc-pkg even exists for example (not that it was a design goal but it seems to be a consequence). On the other hand we're currently failing users by not making programs they install work by default. Currently cabal-install installs all binaries to ~/.cabal/bin by default. It does per-user installs by default and uses ~/.cabal as its prefix. Obviously ~/.cabal/bin is not on the $PATH, so users who install say, yi or whatever find that typing yi at the prompt does not do anything even though they just installed it. That's a failure on our part. It should work, and if we cannot make it work by default then we need to tell users what they need to do to make it work. So I'd like to discuss what defaults we should use. For reference, these are the features that are implemented right now that we have to play with: * We can do per-user or global installs (affects which package db we use but it also changes the default prefix) * We can set any --prefix we like * We can use versioned binaries (ie adding -$version suffixes) * We can add symlinks to binaries in some other directory * We can use a commend like sudo to do the install phase We can control all these features in the ~/.cabal/config file. When cabal-install is first run it creates a default ~/.cabal/config file. So the question is what default it should set and how we report failure cases to the user. We do not have to use the same defaults on every platform. If we can get away with it I think it's much nicer not to make it interactive. Here's a couple suggestions: For unix systems, do per-user installs to --prefix=~/.cabal but if ~/bin exists then add symlinks there. Or perhaps if ~/bin is not a convention on that unix platform (eg OSX) then do global installs by default to /usr/local and use sudo for the install phase (we know that OS X comes with sudo where as it may or may not on other unix systems). Duncan

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patch applied (cabal-install): Use the given working dir when preparing to call setup
by Duncan Coutts 03 Aug '08

03 Aug '08

Sat Aug 2 17:20:45 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Use the given working dir when preparing to call setup I introduced a subtle bug with paths when I stopped using inDir outside of setupWrapper. It was using the current dir to find Setup.hs rather than the target dir. That ofen works because there's a Setup.hs in the local dir. I think it's now fixed to always use paths relative to workingDir. As before, it invokes the setup binary giving it the new working dir. M ./Distribution/Client/SetupWrapper.hs -7 +11 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080803002045-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Add a LocalRepo kind of Repo and refactor the Fetch code
by Duncan Coutts 03 Aug '08

03 Aug '08

Sat Aug 2 11:07:50 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Add a LocalRepo kind of Repo and refactor the Fetch code This is the groundwork needed to support local repositories, that is ones acessable via the local filesystem and without a corresponding download cache. They use the same format/layout as the download cache of a remote repo. M ./Distribution/Client/Config.hs -5 +6 M ./Distribution/Client/Fetch.hs -102 +111 M ./Distribution/Client/IndexUtils.hs -1 +1 M ./Distribution/Client/Install.hs -5 +5 M ./Distribution/Client/Reporting.hs -9 +16 M ./Distribution/Client/Types.hs -10 +9 M ./Distribution/Client/Update.hs -6 +8 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802180750-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Warn about symlinks that could not be created
by Duncan Coutts 02 Aug '08

02 Aug '08

Sat Aug 2 06:39:22 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Warn about symlinks that could not be created M ./Distribution/Client/Install.hs -2 +30 M ./Distribution/Client/InstallSymlink.hs -13 +21 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802133922-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Fix generating haddock docs
by Duncan Coutts 02 Aug '08

02 Aug '08

Sat Aug 2 06:38:55 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Fix generating haddock docs M ./Distribution/Client/Config.hs -2 +2 M ./Distribution/Client/Logging.hs -3 +3 M ./Distribution/Client/Reporting.hs -2 +2 M ./cabal-install.cabal +1 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802133855-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Bump minor version number
by Duncan Coutts 02 Aug '08

02 Aug '08

Fri Aug 1 20:07:23 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Bump minor version number M ./cabal-install.cabal -1 +1 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802030723-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Add a symlink-bindir field to the config file
by Duncan Coutts 02 Aug '08

02 Aug '08

Fri Aug 1 19:57:30 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Add a symlink-bindir field to the config file and link it up with the symlink feature code. M ./Distribution/Client/Config.hs -1 +7 M ./Distribution/Client/Setup.hs -3 +6 M ./Main.hs -2 +6 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802025730-adfee-…

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patch applied (cabal-install): Add feature to symlink binaries into another dir
by Duncan Coutts 02 Aug '08

02 Aug '08

Fri Aug 1 19:56:54 PDT 2008 Duncan Coutts <duncan(a)haskell.org> * Add feature to symlink binaries into another dir This covers the major part of ticket #289. M ./Distribution/Client/Install.hs +2 A ./Distribution/Client/InstallSymlink.hs M ./cabal-install.cabal +2 View patch online: http://darcs.haskell.org/cabal-install/_darcs/patches/20080802025654-adfee-…

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