See https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/2310 for a continuation of the
sad bootstrap.sh saga.
On Thu, Jan 1, 2015 at 6:43 AM, Herbert Valerio Riedel
On 2014-12-30 at 21:23:19 +0100, Jake Wheat wrote:
[...]
Simplify the bootstrap.sh process:
* always use a fixed set of versions of packages for the dependencies
For me, the primary use-case of `bootstrap.sh` is to be able to build a matching `cabal-install` executable for a given major GHC version w/o requiring having an existing cabal-install executable compatible w/ the GHC version I'm trying to bootstrap cabal-install with. (If I had an older `cabal-install` executable, I would use that to bootstrap the new one)
So, if a given cabal-install's bootstrap.sh would only support bootstrapping via its associated GHC major version (e.g. cabal-install-1.22.x would require GHC 7.10.x) then I guess the bootstrap.sh wouldn't need to perform any significant package version resolving, and could just use such a single fixed set of versions (and preferably in a sandbox to ignore any user pkg-db) as you seem to propose.
Alternatively, GHC could start bundling cabal-install, which would IMHO eliminate the need for a bootstrap.sh in the first place (but we had that discussion already, and it would also require to pull cabal-install's dependencies into the GHC distribution, while OTOH GHC is trying to avoid acquiring additional build dependencies...)
Cheers, hvr