Re: Integrating tools with Cabal

Thanks for the suggestion. Is the "protocol" between Cabal and ghc described anywhere, or do I need to read the sources for that? Also, is there a way to write a program that would be equivalent to "cabal configure && cabal build" without relying on cabal-install or ghc being installed, just by using the Cabal library? I realise that it would only work for build-type: Simple, but it might be still useful. * Mikhail Glushenkov [2012-11-09 08:57:30+0100]

Hi,

On Fri, Nov 9, 2012 at 8:06 AM, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

...

Hi,

Suppose I have some kind of analysis tool that I want to run on a Cabal project.

The analysis tool only deals with Haskell files, so I need Cabal to generate Haskell files from CPP-enabled Haskell files, .hsc files, alex and happy files etc.

I see two possible ways to do that: use Cabal as a library, or my tool to be run by Cabal as a compiler.

I think that the path of least resistance is to make your analysis tool command-line compatible with ghc. Then you can use it like this:

$ cabal configure --with-compiler=/path/to/my-ghc $ cabal build

Since 'cabal build' usually just calls 'ghc --make Main.hs', you'll need to do dependency chasing, but this can be implemented by parsing the output of 'ghc -M'.

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