#331: pkg-config error messages could be better ----------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Reporter: duncan | Owner: Type: defect | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Cabal library | Version: 1.4.0.1 Severity: normal | Keywords: Difficulty: very easy (<1 hour) | Ghcversion: 6.8.2 Platform: | ----------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Currently if you `cabal install X11-xft` but don't have the xft development package installed you get this during configure: {{{ cabal: The pkg-config package xft is required but it could not be found. }}} What is not immediately clear is that this is a native package and thus not something that `cabal-install` could have gone and fetched. So the wording of this message could be improved. Perhaps mentioning both in general terms and then specifically. For example saying that the development files for xft are not installed and that the user probably can and should install a native package that provides it. Specifically it's looking for a xft.pc file that pkg-config uses to tell is what compiler flags to use to use xft. A related problem is that the message is somewhat lost in the noise because we print the error to stdout rather than throwing it as an exception that we could print in the final summary. This problem is particulary bad when we have to have error message cross process boundaries, ie when cabal-install invokes a setup program. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/331 Hackage http://haskell.org/cabal/ Hackage: Cabal and related projects