Re: Cabal bugs

On Fri, 2008-03-07 at 13:48 +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

Duncan Coutts wrote:

...

That tells us what package names and versions are installed but it doesn't help with finding out what the installed packages depend on or what cpp flags they used or anything else. For that we need the InstalledPackageInfo rather than the unconfigured .cabal files.

With respect, the nhc98 compiler neither has nor uses an InstalledPackageInfo for any package. If Cabal wants that information, Cabal should (a) generate it, and (b) store it. I don't see the point of duplicating all that machinery in nhc98, when we don't need it. Cabal is the package manager, after all.

Yes, absolutely. For Hugs Cabal already generates an InstalledPackageInfo file and installs it with each package. We just need to get it to do the same for nhc98 which will be trivial. The one thing we'd need from nhc98 is for those generated files to be included for the core packages that come with a standard nhc98 install. Cabal can then take care of installing them for all packages the user installs later. So I guess we'd need to adapt the nhc98 build procedure a bit to use Cabal to generate the info files so they can be included into the install. Does that sounds reasonable? Duncan