Re: bootstrapping

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 11:33 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Duncan Coutts wrote:

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Is it still possible to upgrade an older version of Cabal (e.g. supplied with ghc-6.2) to the latest version, using only the older version of Cabal itself?

We've never supported building with an older version of cabal, but fortunately that's never necessary since it can always self-bootstrap:

Ah, I see. That's quite clever. So any new version of Cabal will always depend on itself to install itself, ignoring any pre-existing version of Cabal. So in fact, you do not even need to have Cabal installed already, to get started!

Yes, in fact it's actually easier when there's no existing Cabal package since then it "Just Works"tm to do: runghc Setup configure runghc Setup build etc.. although that's a tad slow since runghc has to interpret all the source modules rather than just Setup.lhs. IMHO it should also work when there is already a Cabal package registered rather than us having to specify "-i.". I've not figured out yet if thats a ghc bug or intended behaviour. Duncan