Re: HLint binary path

On Sun, 2011-07-31 at 14:37 +0800, Neil Mitchell wrote:

Hi Andrew,

I'm afraid I have no idea, I only use HLint on Windows, where it gets installed with all other Haskell binaries which is on the $PATH. I suspect the cabal-devel list will have an answer.

Thanks, Neil

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 4:11 AM, Andrew Pennebaker wrote:

...

HLint is very cool, but by default the binary is put in ~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.0.3/lib/hlint-1.8.13/bin without being added to $PATH. Is there a cabal option to either put it in a directory known to $PATH or add ~/Library/Haskell/ghc-7.0.3/lib/hlint-1.8.13/bin to $PATH as part of the installation process?

For reasons I don't quite understand, the OSX HP installer modifies the ~/.cabal/config to put binaries in those locations and not into any common directory that can be placed on the $PATH. You can change this to use a single bin dir by editing your ~/.cabal/config. We'll have to take it up with the people who prepare the HP on OSX to get a proper solution. I'm reminded that there's a bug in the symlink-bindir feature which prevents symlinking into a common dir in the case that the actual bin dir is different for each package. If we fix that then that would provide another solution on OSX. We'd still have the problem that there is no per-user location on OSX that is in the user's $PATH, so there's nowhere we can install things that will "Just Work" without any user intervention. The same is actually true on Windows too, but for some reason it's acceptable to modify the user's $PATH on Windows but not on OSX. Duncan