#227: Cabal-install does not track down build-tools: dependencies? ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ Reporter: guest | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: cabal-install tool | Version: 1.2.3.0 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: normal | Ghcversion: 6.8.2 Platform: | ---------------------------------+------------------------------------------ On #haskell, nelhage mentioned that one of the bugs he ran into while trying to install Yi-0.3 through cabal-install was an error which looked like this: <pre> Installing: /home/gwern/.cabal/lib/regex-posix-0.72.0.2/ghc-6.8.2/regex- posix-0.72.0.2/ghc-6.8.2 Registering regex-posix-0.72.0.2... Reading package info from "dist/installed-pkg-config" ... done. Saving old package config file... done. Writing new package config file... done. 'yi-0.3' is cached. [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( Setup.hs, dist/setup/Main.o ) Linking dist/setup/setup ... Configuring yi-0.3... setup: alex version >=2.0.1&&<3 is required but it could not be found. </pre> That is, the dependency on Alex (a version which satisfied >=2.0.1&&<3) was not met. Perfectly sensible as he did not have Alex installed. Puzzled, he did a 'cabal install alex', which worked, and then re-started. (I guess he had his GHC installed locally?). He and I were puzzled, because cabal-install is supposed/usually does track down dependencies. Is build-tools excluded for a reason, or was it just accidentally omitted from dependency-tracking? If the latter, I think this is a bit of a bug. (I use Cabal-1.2.3.0, btw, and the error message above was my reproduction of Nelhage's problem. I had to uninstall Alex from my system, but that did the trick, and reinstalling bypassed the issue just fine - which is why I hadn't seen it before.) -- gwern -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/227 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects